Somewhere a Clock is Ticking
by Bone Dry
Summary: (TTT...Boom sequel) By the time Sing Sing notices the glitch, serial killer Scott Dunn has long since fled the prison and the county, prompting a call to his arresting officer and the former object of his psychosis, Kate Beckett – who soon finds that the trail he's left her is one that is not only littered with corpses, but is going almost entirely downhill. Set earlyish s5. B/C.
1. Domino

Somewhere a Clock is Ticking  
_In slow motion, the blast is beautiful..._

* * *

Characters: Kate Beckett, Richard Castle & Ensemble; Jordan Shaw, Scott Dunn (Tick, Tick, Tick...Boom), sundry of ghosts  
Pairings: Beckett/Castle, Ryan/Jenny  
Rating: R (language, gore, intense violence)  
Genre: case; angst; light romance; general (and soul-crushing) misery  
Setting: mid-January 2013 (s5)

**A/N: **Dark, angsty; set winter, earlyish s5 (preceding significant episodes such as "Recoil" and "Hunt"). Deals heavily with Beckett's shooting, and with a lot of the less pleasant aspects of Beckett and Castle's relationship (the idealization, the guilt, the anger, the not-talking-about-any-of-the-problems-ever, the worries, the fears). It's not a 100% angst-fest (more like...93%), and it is ultimately Caskett, but there are some arguments I want them to have, and there are some things with Beckett I wanted to explore. Scott Dunn was a nice a catalyst, with the history and the intense violence he brings to the table. Bottom line: angst, fluff stripped bare.

In the interest of continuity, my final note is that I'm making one small tweak to canon: that Beckett bears not only the scar from the bullet, but from the sternum spreader the surgeons used to crack open her chest (and the tube they shoved through her ribs). Both should've been there anyway, and visually it's a lot more horrific and a lot more obvious.

* * *

Chapter One: Domino

* * *

He walked down the hallway. The doors were lined with lights, but it was still dark. It was dim in the daytime, but at night it was dark, like the lights only barely existed. He knew that because he'd been here before. Yesterday. And now he was here again.

He walked down the hallway. He saw the door in his head. Saw the numbers on the door, though he couldn't remember what they read. He noticed his hands were sweating as he reached in his pocket for the address he'd scribbled on the back of a cab receipt. 20. It was 20. He remembered just as he removed the paper. He put it back in his pocket.

He walked down the hallway. Stopped at the door. At 20. Tonight was the night. He could see it all playing out in his head. Two years of planning. Three of thinking about it. Tonight he was going to do it. Tonight.

He cocked the gun in his hand. He hadn't bothered to hide it. It was so dark in the hallway, no one would see it, even if they looked, and no one had. He hadn't seen anybody. The place seemed deserted.

He knocked. His hands were stiff, quivering with excitement. He steadied them.

The door took forever to open. He knew he was home. He knew because he'd watched, and waited.

The door opened. "Hello?" Gold light streamed into the hallway, and he saw just one of his target's eyes. The door had opened only slightly. A chain stopped it. Typical distrustful New Yorkers. Though in this case, it was justified.

He helped the door the rest of the way open with his shoulder. It held up better than expected, and he heard the man shout something, suddenly panicked. Also justified. He gave it another ram, and the door popped open. It split like plywood.

And then he was inside, and for a moment they both just stood there, staring stupidly at each other. He thought of one of those little hot dog dogs coming face-to-face with a Doberman, too terrified to make eye contact. And then he smiled. And then he raised the gun. It was silenced.

"Please, what do you want?"

He didn't reply. He could just make out his eyes between the little white dots on the sights, on the kill end of the barrel.

He pulled the trigger before he could could get another word out, and then he just dropped like a sack of flour. It was surreal. Just a bang, a little kick, and there he was, on the floor.

Everything just went still.

"Please..."

He blinked, walked forward. The guy was still alive. For the next ten seconds, anyway.

"Oh, god..."

He stood right over him, looking down at his face. There was blood in his mouth. He was coughing on it, staring up at him. And at that moment, he was surprised to find how unmoved he was. He thought he might feel something. Just...something, anything. But he didn't.

He centered the muzzle over his forehead. Pulled the trigger again.

Watched his eyes glaze over.

And that was that.

* * *

She hit the alarm when she woke up. It hadn't gone off yet. She had another half an hour of sleep available to her, but she sat up instead, rubbing her eyes to clear the muzziness from her head. It was still dark outside, charcoal clouds having smothered the sun and dulled the edges of neighboring buildings to a blur. Just below, cars stopped and started, honked at each other. Someone was running their bass, and it tapped distantly against the window.

_Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump _

And then it stopped, a second after she noticed it.

Blinking heavily, she looked left. Castle was still asleep. He looked so peaceful there, sleeping, it was almost disgusting. For one fleeting moment, she considered throwing a pillow in his face, but then the moment passed, and Kate Beckett rolled from her bed. She found her old NYU shirt hanging over a chair, slipped it on, then left the bedroom, leaving Castle to his sleep. The wood floor was cold on her feet as she padded to the kitchen, intent on the coffee machine. She stopped there after she turned it on, staring out the frosted window at the grey, smudgy, formless blob that was her world. Maybe it was because she'd woken up before the alarm, maybe it was the writer asleep in the other room, hell, maybe it was last night, but this morning had an odd sort of peace to it, and she felt...good. Content.

Smiling a small, private smile, she went to the bathroom to start her morning routine. She'd been feeling that a lot lately. Content. It wasn't exactly a foreign feeling, but it felt uncomplicated, and it felt nice. No case hanging overhead, no 3 AM call about some guy dead in his apartment. Just a good night and a quiet morning.

If she didn't know herself better, she'd say she could almost get used to it.

She spat her toothpaste, rinsed her mouth, then returned to the kitchen. The coffee was gargling and filling the kettle, so she reached for a couple mugs and set them on the counter. Then her eyes wandered until she found Castle's laptop on the table. It was open, asleep but still running. He'd insisted she finish her paperwork at home rather than the precinct, said he'd write while she was writing or something like that; writing about her writing to make it seem more exciting – to him, at any rate.

Glancing into the bedroom to check for his shadow, she walked over to the laptop, then sat on the couch and pulled it to her. The thing wasn't password protected, and when she turned it on it was still on the document, still hovering mid-word where she'd pulled him away.

She scrolled up. Picked a random paragraph to start from. Felt her brow lift an inch.

_God and the angels were crying that night. Either that, or they had had way, way too much beer and were pissing it down. Heat shielded her eyes as she stared up at the storm. Sandy may have passed, but tonight that didn't really matter. She was soaked to the bone. Her clothes clung to her like she'd just stepped out of a pool. She stood there, soaking up the angels' tears like a shower, laughing to herself. It sounded victorious, and maybe just a little psychotic. As if she'd made them cry. For her._

_ Blood ran off the steps beside her. She could smell the shot in the rain. The rain had washed away the blood, washed away the rose, but not the smell, and when she looked over the guy's warm, dead body, she met Rook's eyes. The buds of romance had long since blossomed into bloom, and the petals were starting to fall, but at that moment it was as if they were staring at each other with new eyes. And at that moment, she kne_

"If you're coasting for porn, I keep that on my other computer. The password's 'kinky.' "

She looked up. Castle was leaning against the bedroom doorway, hair disheveled, a blanket wrapped around him like a toga. He was staring at her with a crooked brow. She wondered how long he'd been standing there.

" 'The buds of romance had blossomed into bloom' ?" she repeated, eyebrow still hiked.

He crossed his arms, "What, you don't like it?"

"Blossomed," she repeated again, smiling despite herself. Shook her head.

He walked forward, "How long have you been up?"

"Uh," she glanced down at the laptop. "Fifteen minutes? There's coffee." She spoke it as she remembered it, and she stood to make her way to the machine.

He caught her hand, held it lightly. "Why don't we leave it?" He was grinning at her, brow still crooked. "It's not too late to go back to bed."

She almost hated herself for smiling back. "Come on, Castle. I still have to shower."

"We can do both." He was rubbing little circles into her palm. His hands were warm.

"I do have a job to get to."

"A very important one," he agreed. He was pulling her toward him, and she found herself letting him.

"Unlike some of us..." She whispered that.

Somehow, they were only an inch apart now.

He leaned in to kiss her.

"Castle," she breathed.

He stopped, hovering a micrometer from her lips. "Hm?" He smelled like mint, and she thought of toothpaste and Tic Tacs and Altoids and bright, blue mouthwash, and she thought of tasting it.

"Is this how the petals fa—"

He swallowed the rest of her sentence.

* * *

By 8:36, Richard Castle was stepping out of the elevator to his loft. For once, he hadn't had to endure _coitus interruptus _in the form of aphone call from the scene of some dead guy on the side of some street (which, yeah, that did happen, and the guy was spread over two blocks; take away: if you're going to dart across a four-lane street, make sure to bring some other pedestrians as a buffer), and Beckett had sent him home after they'd finally gotten around to their coffee. Not that he hadn't brought a change of clothes — they were beyond the walk-of-shame portion of their relationship, thank you – but as long as he had the morning, he had a laundry Situation to take care of. (Seriously, it was dire. He was down to his last pair of jock shorts, and he may have left that one under Beckett's bed.) So they split at her apartment's lobby. She went down the street to the parking garage; he crossed it to head for the subway. While he considered himself a man of great daring and courage and adventure, he had yet to be convinced to get on the back of her bike. He saw how she drove cars (as if she took personal offense to the road and everyone on it), and those things had _four_ wheels.

So they split with a kiss and a wave. It was nice, and it wasn't like he wouldn't be seeing her again by lunch. Or possibly for lunch. At that little bistro by the park.

You know, at this point, he could so pass the Police Academy. He practically lived at the station as it was.

He slipped his key into the lock, opened the door, typed in the security code.

I mean, okay, maybe not the physical so much, but everything else...He'd pass, and sometimes (but only sometimes) he imagined the look on Beckett's face when he would walk in with his very own, shiny, new Desert Eagle (once he got the carry permit Situation taken care of). No Glocks or Sigs for this writer, oh no. Although that gun Dirty Harry had was pretty cool...

Maybe he could just have both. It wasn't as if Beckett didn't o...

"Dad?"

He jumped out of the way of her voice (panther reflexes). "Hey, my daughter mine," he said cheerfully, noting that he hadn't, in fact, been in any danger of actually running into her. She was standing in the kitchen. "How's it hanging?"

"Good," her eyes flicked all over him as she walked over, searching for evidence of...what? He suddenly felt like he had something on his face. "How's Beckett?" she asked.

"She's good," he said, rubbing his cheek self-consciously. "We had a nice time last night."

She held up a hand, "I'm glad we have such an open, honest relationship, but there are things we don't need to share."

He nodded solemnly, "I respect your wishes. So," he walked over to the nearest chair and plopped into it, dropping his bag beside it. "We gonna do movie night tonight?"

When she looked away, he knew instantly that they wouldn't be. He tried his best to keep the disappointment off his face as she spoke, "I'm sorry, I, uh...my friends just sent me a text a few minutes ago asking if I wanted to go out with them tonight, and I already said yes..." her voice trailed off. She stood there awkwardly for a moment, then walked over and gave him a hug. "I'm really sorry," she said.

"It's okay," he said as she pulled away.

"I mean, if it's really important to you, I can cancel."

"No, no," he held both her hands. "No, you go out and have a good time." He squeezed them, then released her and got to his feet. "In the meantime, you want to have breakfast? I'm starved." There was no way she wasn't accepting. She was still in her p-jays. No phone in hand. He'd found her in the kitchen. This was a slam-dunk.

"Yeah, sure," she said and smiled.

The fear that she was leaving melted from his heart. "Awesome!" he said, walking into the kitchen. "So what do we want?"

She followed him. "Waffles?"

"Waffles it is!" he could practically hear the exclamation point in his voice. His daughter was home over winter interim (on his insistence), and although they'd spent a good portion of that time together, they'd spent a better portion of it apart. As far as he was concerned, her classes would be starting up again all too soon, and he wasn't looking forward to the empty house. Some guys liked the bachelor life. Hell, some guys needed it. But he had a housekeeper and had lived with women most of his life. The whole stag thing wasn't really his scene.

Alexis pulled out the waffle press and greased it while Castle located and beat together the ingredients. When her scant duties were complete, Alexis took a seat on the stool to watch him mix away. She smiled, "I'm glad we still do this."

"Please, it's family tradition," he said. "You watching while I do all the work."

She scoffed, but didn't take the bait or the hint. "So are you home for the day?"

It was his turn to look away, "No, I'm going to meet up with Beckett in a few hours."

"Big case?" her face was neutral. Lately, he just never knew what she wanted to hear. Though, he supposed if he was honest with himself, this had been going on longer than just lately...

"No," he shook his head. "No case. But, you know, this is New York. Sure she's five minutes away from catching another fresh one." He paused. "Hopefully not literally."

She glanced down at her hands. Looked back up, "Not sure whether we should be hoping for that or not."

"Well, then Beckett would be out of a job, and I'd have to split the proceeds from my books with her, so..."

"Then I guess we'll hope for a nice double homicide," she stood. "Or a serial killing."

"Sounds good," he dumped in the chocolate chips.

"Mm," she came around to his side. "Need any help with that?"

He nodded. "Scoop the bowl?" he asked, holding it up.

"Consider it done." She reached for the rubber scrapey thing.

They stopped talking about cops and dead people after that.

* * *

The elevator doors of the 12th Precinct opened just a few minutes shy of shift start, and Beckett walked out, coat and bag slung over her arm, still enjoying the heat as it worked to burn the last of the ice from her face and fingertips. She knew that her enjoyment of the pizza oven temp could only last as long as it took for her mouth to dry and her skin to start itching, but for the moment she loved the warmth as it settled under her turtleneck and around her freezing toes, because even though she'd hardly missed a winter in the city since her birth—excepting those blissful semesters in California—she still hated the cold.

Especially since the incident a couple years back...

"Yo, Beckett," Javier Esposito hailed her from the break room. "Starting off the morning a little late?"

She arched a brow at him as she approached, shucking off her gloves. "Oh, please."

Kevin Ryan smiled at her from his perch on one of the counter tops. "Yeah, you're almost keeping human time now."

"Shut up," she looked at Esposito as he snorted, then shoved the rest of a doughnut in his mouth. "Anymore of those left?"

He winced, very fakely. There was powder dusting his nose and chin. "Jeez, you know, if you'd only come sooner..."

"Stop screwing with me, Espo, and just give me my doughnut."

He smirked at her as he held out a folded napkin. She was itching to wipe it off his face, but she accepted his offering without violence.

Instead, she switched topics. "Night shift pull anything in?" she asked, leaning against the counter opposite Frick and Frack.

Ryan shook his head, "Nothing exciting."

"Heard Lanie had an interesting night," Esposito said.

"Oh?" she looked at him.

"Yeah. Got called out on a report of a baby in a dumpster. Turns out..." he let that hang for a moment as he ate another doughnut. "Turns out, it was just a duck."

"Like, a duck, quack, quack?" Ryan asked.

"Like Donald Friggin' Duck." He pointed at him with sugar-coated fingers, then looked down, as if only just noticing they were attached to his hand. "Can you hand me a napkin, bro?" he said.

"Yeah, sure."

Beckett watched their exchange, shaking her head. "Sure Lanie was pleased."

"Yeah," Esposito said, wiping off his fingers. "Cop called at her home. Was absolutely convinced he had a dead kid. Didn't even believe her when she came down and told him what it was at first."

She ripped off a piece of doughnut and ate it. "Well, that's an interesting story, Espo, but how did you manage to hear it?" She was smirking now.

He colored. "She told me this morning."

Ryan snorted. "Of course she did."

"At the morgue." He looked at his partner. "Went down there to get the lab report on the Kissinger case."

"And you mock me," Beckett ate the rest of the doughnut.

"We are _not_ back together."

"Uh huh," she pushed off the counter.

They followed her out of the break room and into the bull pen, still going back and forth on the Lanie issue. Beckett decided to leave them to it, draping her coat around her chair, then dropping into it. She pulled her paperwork from her bag and started leafing through it. She hadn't managed to finish it, an outcome she had never quite deluded herself into believing had been avoidable last night, but due date was looming and choices were dwindling. With a sigh, she pulled her pen from the little chalk-line body post-it/pencil holder thing Castle had given her awhile ago and set to work finalizing the incident reports.

Her phone rang as she was literally dotting an 'i'. "Beckett," she said, picking it up .

"Is this Detective Kate Beckett, 12th Precinct?" was the response. Male. Middle-aged. Bronx accent.

"Yes," she said, crossing a 't.'

"This is Brian Dobbs. I'm the director of operations at Sing Sing."

She paused her scribbling, interest snagged. Sing Sing was way outside her turf.

"I just got off the phone with the FBI," Dobbs continued. "They told me to call you. Got your contact info from the file."

"The FBI?" she repeated, now definitely interested. She put down her pen. "What file?"

"I'm sorry to have to tell you this," Dobbs said, "But earlier this morning Scott Dunn escaped."

Her breath caught in her throat. "What?" she asked, swallowing the lump, sure she'd heard it wrong. "There has to be some sort of mistake."

"Well, there was," he said. "That's how he escaped."

"Are you seriously making jokes with me?" she stood suddenly. Her chair slid away, hit another desk. She barely heard it. Ryan and Esposito looked at her, snapped out of conversation.

"No. I'm sorry, Detective."

She pressed three fingers against her temple, focusing her gaze on a chip in the wood grain of her desk. "How did this happen?"

"We're still sorting that out ourselves. I don't have any details for you, beyond the fact that he wasn't at roll call and no one's seen him since the morning."

_Scott Dunn escaped_.

Ryan and Esposito were on their feet now, heading toward her, and they stopped just beside her desk, waiting for her to share what was going on. She found herself wondering vaguely why they didn't just pick up the other phone.

"So, what, he just...disappeared?" she said. "Sing Sing is max security. How the hell could something like this happen?"

"Hey, Detective, don't shoot the messenger. We only just found out."

"I'm coming up there," she said, the decision made as she spoke it. "Tell the guards to expect us."

"Us?" he said.

"We'll call you back." She dropped the phone into its cradle, then ran her fingers through her hair, exhaling a long breath. She suddenly became conscious of her heart banging against her ribs. The ache was dull. She'd almost gone the morning without feeling it.

"What was that about?" Esposito said.

She dropped her hands. Opened her mouth. Inhaled.

The phone rang again.

Blowing out the breath, she held up a finger, then grabbed the phone. "Beckett," she said.

"You heard?"

It'd been three years, but she knew Special Agent Jordan Shaw's voice when she heard it. "I heard," she replied.

"I assume you're already en route to Sing Sing?"

"Yes."

"I've got a few cases to wrap up here, but I'm taking the first flight down to the city tomorrow."

Under any other circumstance, she might have argued against it. But this was almost as personal to Shaw as it was to her. "I'll see you then," she said.

"Yep." And then she hung up. Beckett liked that about her. Short, to the point, all-business.

She put the phone down again.

"Okay, seriously," Esposito said. "What the hell is going on?"

She looked at him. "Scott Dunn escaped from prison this morning."

* * *

"Who is Scott Dunn?" Victoria Gates, Captain of the 12th Precinct, said.

Castle leaned against the wall, watching silently as Beckett handed Gates a file. Beckett was tense, angry, a whole world away from the woman he'd found on the couch and drawn back to bed this morning. He hadn't known what to make of her voice when she'd called him away from his daughter a half hour ago. His first, nightmarish thought was that something new had surfaced from her past in the scant hours they'd been apart, but when she'd told him what was going on, he wasn't quite sure this was any better (he was, in fact, pretty sure this wasn't any better).

"Dunn cut a swath through the city a few years ago," Beckett said, slipping a hand into her pocket. "Ben Conrad, Alex Peterman, Michelle Lewis, Sandra Keller, Gloria Rodriguez, he killed those five in as many days. He then kidnapped a federal agent and attempted to kill her entire squad, and me." It was amazing how casually she slipped that in there. He certainly didn't feel that casual about it. "Before New York, he was in Seattle. Killed five prostitutes and framed a local businessman named Keith Lewis for it before shooting him in the head. Lewis' death was ruled a suicide until our investigation."

Gates stood. "I remember this case now," she said. "You were the lead investigator. Wasn't he in contact with you several times over the course of his spree?"

"In a sense," her tone was stone hard, but Castle could hear the old bitterness in it. "He called to report his murders. He dared me to stop him, sent me little messages. Carved them into the bullets he shot his victims with. Dumped one of their bodies on my doorstep. That was just before he blew up my apartment." She paused, eyebrows pinching. "He left me homeless for months."

The Captain stared at her for a beat. Castle didn't remember how much of this had made it into the news and around the cop grapevine, but he got the feeling if any of it had, Gates didn't recall it.

"Sir," Beckett said, filling the silence, "Dunn didn't do it because he got spanked when he was six or because he hated his mother. He did it because he enjoyed it. He was diagnosed as a sociopath out West, did a stint at a psychiatric facility. This man is volatile and extremely dangerous, and he's been sitting in a box for three years."

"And now he's not," Gates sighed.

"I'm going up to Sing Sing," she continued. "The cavalry will be here tomorrow, but we've got to get the ball rolling as soon as possible."

"Detective," Gates held up a hand. "Do you honestly think I can let you lead this investigation?"

"Yes," a single hydrogen atom could fit in the space she'd left for compromise in her voice. "No one understands this guy like I do, and we don't have time to get someone else up to speed."

Gates studied her for a long moment, weighing invisible, golden scales. It seemed to drag on forever. Finally, she said. "Alright, Detective."

About three of the seven hundred muscles in Beckett's body relaxed, and then she left the room without another word.

Castle looked between Gates and Beckett's retreating form a few times, then got off the wall, pointed in the general direction of the door, and mumbled some sort of apology-goodbye before going through it.

"You guys ready?" Beckett asked without slowing.

"Yeah," Ryan said. He and Esposito had been sitting on a desk. They joined Castle in following her to the elevator. No one said anything as they waited for the car to arrive, nor as they walked inside it. Castle was sure all of them were remembering what had happened the last time they'd dealt with Scott Dunn, and he wondered what scene was playing out in their heads.

The detectives split ways at the bottom of the precinct steps, and Castle followed Beckett to her car, which they entered silently. He watched her as she slipped on her seat belt and keyed the ignition. His own little memory byte was looping in his brain. It'd been looping since she'd called.

Several minutes passed. He just kept on watching her as she backed the car and put it in drive.

"What?" she said finally, as they bumped over the exit. "You got a problem with me working this case too?"

"I didn't say anything," he couldn't stop the words, though he knew as he said them that they were gonna piss her off.

"You didn't have to, Castle."

Yep.

She wrenched the wheel violently to get between a van and a taxi, floating on the lane divide for a beat before passing another car. Someone honked.

He switched tacts when she stopped to obey a light. "I'm just worried, Kate."

She glanced at him. Her face softened, though her eyes didn't. "Sorry," she said, looking back out the windshield. "Didn't mean to snap."

"Think he's halfway to Canada by now?" he asked.

"I don't know." She didn't look at him.

"Yeah," he said, leaning back in his seat. "I don't either."

She didn't reply.

The silence came back as she made her way onto FDR, and there it settled, as heavy as the morning fog. Between it and the images running through his head, he could feel the air condensing to lead in his lungs. Finally, he cracked, "I just keep seeing it."

Her gaze flicked to his. Went back to the road. "What?" she said.

"That moment when I was standing outside your building. When I watched it blow."

She shifted.

"Did I ever tell you how scared I was?"

Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. "Castle, just...just don't, alright?"

"Okay," he said.

The silence returned, and, this time, it would be here to stay. He directed his gaze out the window, feeling cold and hollow. He wished she'd let him touch her.

And then he was surprised to hear her voice again, low and dangerously human. "I keep seeing it too," she said. "That moment when the world fell in around me, when I went deaf and blind from the blast. I think I blacked out for a minute, and when I woke up...that first second, I thought I was dead, and the next I realized I wasn't, but I'd lost my home, and half my world was burning."

He looked at her, but whatever part of her soul had spoken had already retreated behind the armor, and she wasn't looking at him.

So he let it go.

And then the silence really did settle between them. Like fog, encased in drying concrete.

* * *

A guy in a Department of Corrections jacket met them at the gates. He introduced himself as Brian Dobbs, then led them into the facility. Esposito and Ryan fell in step just behind the group, allowing Beckett to have her space in the lead. Even Castle kept slightly behind her. She was angry. She was hiding it, but she was angry.

"What happened to Pollman?" she asked. Pollman was the former director of Sing Sing. He remembered her weekly calls to him, back when she'd been trying to crack Hal Lockwood. That seemed like a long time ago.

"He retired," Dobbs said. "You knew each other?"

"Yeah," she said. Her face revealed nothing of the history there. "So tell me what you know."

He ushered them into a closet some janitor had obviously abandoned—his office, apparently—then reached for one of the folders on his desk. "At 6:23 this morning," he said, "we carried out a transfer order from..." he flipped the folder open, "the Metropolitan Correctional Center for one of our inmates, Marshall Franco. A couple uniforms arrived, and we sent them and Franco on his merry way with one of my guards."

"But it wasn't Franco," Beckett said.

"No," he shook his head. "Franco's currently chilling in Block D."

"Was the transfer order legitimate?"

"Yes," he handed her one of the papers in the folder, which she glanced at. "I signed it myself. Someone went in and switched Franco's ID info with Dunn's."

Dunn's accomplice. He could almost hear the thought flashing through all their heads at once.

She took a moment to digest that. In her silence, Castle opened his mouth, "When did you notice the glitch?"

"8:05."

"I assume you tried raising the guard?" Beckett asked.

"Yeah. No reply."

"Do you have the information from the officers who picked him up?"

"Yeah," he said, then grabbed another paper from his folder, which he held out to her. He pointed at something on it. "Names and badge numbers, right here."

"And the guard?"

"Right below that."

"May I?" she took the page, then immediately turned. "Ryan?"

"On it," he took it. He made brief eye contact with Esposito before moving past him and into the hallway, cell already out.

"Look, Detective," Dobbs said. "I know this guard— David Sharp. He's good people."

"I'm sorry, but we can't just take your word for it.." Beckett looked at him again, "Do we have GPS on the truck used to transport?"

He just looked at her. "I have no idea."

"Well, find out," she exhaled. "I'd like to talk to whoever signed him over."

Dobbs nodded. He had that look on his face like he'd just spent several hours with her in the box. "That would be Officer Zehner," at least he still sounded professional. "I'll call him in."

"Okay," she turned. "Esposito, track down that car. Castle and I will talk to Zehner."

He nodded, "Done."

"Okay," she murmured that to herself, looked at Dobbs again. "Have Zehner meet us at your break room. Come on, Castle." She swept out of the little broom closet then, looking for all intents and purposes like she needed some air. Castle followed her, looking worried but saying nothing. Esposito wondered how long that would last.

And then it was suddenly just the two of them standing there. "I'm going to buzz Zehner," Dobbs said. "You just need the vehicle information?"

"Yeah," he said. "Whatever you've got."

Five minutes later, he was out in the hall, phone pressed to his ear, fresh print-out in hand, listening to a grainy-ass version of what sounded like "Good Morning Starshine" as he waited for the insurance people to pick up. He wondered if this song was appropriate for anyone who had to call insurance people, let alone him.

_Gliddy glup gloopy nibby nabby noopy la la la..._

Ryan was about a yard away, muttering "Uh huhs" into the phone as he scribbled down notes. Then he said his thanks, clicked off, and walked over. "Okay, so, Central can't raise either Officer Falk or Officer Reyes. They haven't been seen or heard from since they left to make the transfer. I had them run our guard—David Sharp—he's clean."

Esposito looked at Ryan.

_Tooby ooby walla..._

"You thinking what I'm thinking, bro?"

"Yeah," Ryan said. "I just hope we're wrong."

* * *

The little strip mall parking lot had already been emptied out by the time they got there. Uniforms were parked at the entrances, four cars. It seemed like a lot of them. Beckett found herself wondering why so many had come as she rolled past them and parked in the middle of the lot. Esposito's car stopped next to hers, and they both got out at the same time. She stared straight ahead, at the unmarked van. GPS had led them here.

As she stood there, she thought about Scott Dunn, that cocky sonofabitch. They were barely ten minutes away from the prison, yet here they'd parked, in a strip mall parking lot four yards away from a Starbucks.

Everything was still in the freezing air, surreally so, like she was standing in a photograph somebody had taken of this moment. Suddenly, it occurred to her that everyone was watching her, waiting for her to do something. So she took a breath and strode forward, trying to push away thoughts of what she was about to find.

A uniform met her halfway to the van.

"You found it?" she asked, not stopping.

"Yeah," he said. "Got your call, found the van, checked the plates."

"You look inside?" she tightened her leather gloves around her fingers.

"No, ma' — Detective." Any other day, his correction might have made her smile. "Heard your message loud and clear."

"Thank you." And then they were at the van. She knew no one was inside anymore, but her hand was hovering a few inches away from her gun, which was loose in its holster, just in case. She brushed eyes with Castle before looking through the passenger side door. She saw nothing. The windows were tinted black.

"Castle," she said, gesturing for him to get behind her. He obeyed without protest and then she nodded at Esposito and Ryan, who had positioned themselves at the back of the van. They all drew at once, and then she opened the door.

"Oh jeez," she muttered, looking away. It didn't make any difference; the scene had seared across her vision at first glance. Behind her, either Castle or the uniform made some sort of noise, but she didn't glance over to see which.

Instead, she looked again.

And the eye looked back, milky white and staring, suspended in its blood-drenched socket like a ping-pong ball. The other eye was gone, along with half the face. That was mashed into pulp and splattered all over the car interior. She could see little bits of brain matter on the dash. What looked like bone bits. Tufts of hair. His body was leaning back in the seat, one hand still resting on the wheel, fingers caught in it.

She swallowed. Remembered she was still holding her pistol. Holstered it.

He was wearing a uniform. Service belt, gun still in it. He hadn't had time to...

"Beckett?" Ryan said. Her thought shattered like glass.

"Yeah?" she looked over, jaw set.

"Better come."

Steeling herself, she walked to him. Looked in the van.

Again she saw the uniform, the brass buttons, the badge. Her gaze crawled up the bloody mess of his chest, up to his face. No holes. He hadn't been shot there. He'd been shot in the chest. And his eyes were staring right through her, at that same cold and terrifying Nothing she'd just seen in the driver's eye, that she'd seen in a hundred corpses, that she'd almost come to drown in herself.

She swallowed again, feeling her heart pound, feeling it ache with each beat, suddenly hot despite the cold. Trying to force herself back into control, she refocused on his face, but despite herself her gaze slid down, to stop on the ragged little holes in his uniform. She studied them with morbid fascination, a thousand horrible little nightmares squirming around her guts. It was a full twenty seconds before she noticed his gun wasn't in his holster.

And then those internal monsters drowned in a flood of rage and magma.

"Call Lanie," she said, to whoever was behind her. "Get her down here. They shouldn't be out here like this."

She could feel her detectives' eyes on her back. If they thought about saying anything, they didn't, and she heard one of them break away to do her bidding.

"How many up front?" Esposito asked.

"Just one," she said. "The other cop." Her voice was tempered steel as she stared at the body in front of her. He was just a kid.

"Beckett," Castle's voice was in her ear. She could hear the concern in it, over the roar of her blood, but that was the last thing in the world she wanted from him.

"I'm fine," she murmured the usual line, then turned away to look at Esposito. "Espo, we've gotta set up a canvas. Talk to everyone who started their shift around the time this van was parked. I'll be there to help in a minute." She turned back to the body then, and a name popped into her head, like she was glancing into an old yearbook. The photo on Ryan's phone. "Brad Falk," she said.

Castle stared at her as if she'd said it in Russian. "What?"

"That's his name," she clarified. "This is Officer Brad Falk. And the man in the driver's seat is Officer Mathew Reyes." Beckett glanced down at Falk again, at his wide, staring, dead eyes, and was spooked suddenly, like someone had grabbed her back with a chilly hand. She quickly stepped away, kept walking until she could no longer see into the van, and Castle followed her. Then she stopped and watched Ryan talk on his phone, not really seeing him. Something was wrong with this picture. "Where's the guard?" she wondered aloud.

Castle blinked, catching her meaning without her having said it. "You thinking he's the accomplice?"

She met his gaze. "I think I want to know where he is."

* * *

The low-rise slouched sullenly against the charcoal clouds, swathed by cracked concrete and a few wispy trees. It glared down at them as Beckett rolled to a stop at the curb and killed the engine, and she glared back, the apartment number repeating like some long, generic kick loop in her head. The building David Sharp had listed as his address had probably been cheap when it'd been new in the 70s, as cheap as it was now, and she knew before she led Castle and the uniforms up to and through the doors that cam footage wouldn't be a possibility for this place. There was no door man.

The complex smelled vaguely like pine sol and musk as they made their way toward the stairs. Beckett kept seeing the cops in the van. Kept seeing the blood doused seats. Kept seeing Dunn, and wondering which one he'd killed, and if he'd smiled when he'd done it, the way he'd smiled at her when she'd testified against him, like this was all some private joke with a punchline only he was privy to.

She fell back into reality as she opened the second floor door, scanning the hallway for number 20. Finding 29, she strode forward, knowing her mark was around the corner, at the end of the hall.

She'd made it most of the way there before she noticed the splintered frame, and all at once she realized what she was about to find. For no reason, Castle's words on the drive up to Ossining suddenly popped into her head, even as she gestured Officers Blake and Slocum into position around the door.

Dunn wasn't halfway to Canada.

She counted down with her fingers. Nodded at Blake.

He was still in New York, and he was only just getting started.

She gritted her teeth. Burst through the door.


	2. Fight Them Soft

Chapter Two: Fight Them Soft

* * *

Captain Victoria Gates set down her phone, then pursed her lips, staring out at the precinct from her office, through the closed doors that separated her from the people who were her responsibility, and her life. Detective Beckett's voice was still ringing in her ears, though it was somber now, stripped of the self-righteousness from a few hours before.

She watched her people mill around outside, huddled around files and computers, hunched over paperwork. The second she walked out, she'd be setting the place afire, approving overtime, pulling together a task force, collecting pages to make into an official information packet to distribute to everyone on the floor and beyond. Too soon, the press would be on this, and she would have to find something to tell them.

But she wasn't going to step out just yet.

She looked back at her computer screen, stared at it until the faces of those bright, young rookies had burned into her retinas. They were apart of the 5. She knew the captain personally. Jeff. Sometimes they got a beer, complained about the monster-in-law, watched the game at the bar. And now she had to call him, tell him two of his people were dead, tell him that the investigation was going to be run by her precinct. She'd have to explain that they'd been murdered by a serial killer, whose identity they knew but whose 20 could very well be Hamilton, Ontario by now.

She picked up the hefty file on Scott Dunn, flipped through the photographs again.

This guy was dangerous, and Castle's part in it worried her. While she'd more or less come to accept Beckett's pet writer, she knew how the book angle might be construed by Jeff, and by the press.

And then there was Beckett herself, heading the case despite her history. Gates wondered how soon she'd have to attempt to clip a leash on the detective, knowing even as she thought it that her efforts would be wasted. The Fantastic Four were the only people in the building who seemed to have yet to absorb her capacity as captain, and where Beckett went, the other three would invariably follow.

And after looking at the digitals of the detective's charred apartment, after reading the statements, she knew that keeping Beckett and her team safe and at heel might only be accomplished with a combination of beepers and an unmarked detail. She only hoped it wouldn't come to that.

Steeling herself, she reached for the phone and inhaled a long, slow breath before dialing. Jeff picked up at second ring, sounding as cheery as a kindergarten teacher. She liked that about him, but today it made her wince.

"Vicki," he said. "How's life at the one-two?"

Once again, she glanced at all her people outside her office, and then she started, "It's been a shitty morning, Jeff..."

* * *

Castle got a ride home with one of the patrol guys who'd come up with them to David Sharp's crime scene. Officer Slocum was a rookie. Talked a lot about how being a cop wasn't anything like what he'd expected when he'd first joined up (not that he'd expected primetime drama, but he'd been hoping for less _COPS_ and more _Law & Order_). He'd said that this was his first real crime scene, and he was amazed to have seen two in the same day. Castle hadn't replied much — he didn't know what really constituted a "real" crime scene, but he'd visited so many over the past half a decade that he had become convinced that they weren't anything to celebrate.

He'd left Beckett at the latest one. He hadn't wanted to, but something in her eyes told him it was time to go, at least for the moment. She needed space. He'd hated giving it to her, leaving her alone, but he had.

He remembered the look on her face when she'd busted in the door to find David Sharp dead on his own carpet, when she'd started tearing apart his place for anything she could find. He'd seen that look before, and it scared him to see it again — more than he wanted to tell her. He didn't want to have that fight again. So he left.

That was what he thought about as Officer Slocum recounted half his life story to him on the drive back to Manhattan. That and the explosion. He was still thinking about that.

When he'd arrived back at his apartment, he'd found it empty. There was a post-it note on the fridge from Alexis. She wished him luck with his day and had drawn a little doodle of crossed light sabers in two different colors of highlighter with the word "tomorrow" penned in under them. It made him smile, though he suspected (in light of...everything) that he wouldn't be able to make it. He tucked the note in his jacket.

And then he wandered around his empty apartment. Stared at the fridge (picked clean). Felt the pangs of empty nest syndrome (not just for lonely, post-menopausal women anymore). He wondered if Beckett had also returned to the city, but didn't call. Instead, he called his mother, who had a long, ironic story involving a taxi driver and one of her acting students. She said she'd be home by dinner. He said he wasn't sure if he would be.

After hanging up, he sat down and wrote a little story. It was about a bird who raced a storm and found shelter with a squirrel. The squirrel pushed half his nuts and seeds and old newspaper shreds out the tree to make space for the bird, and they waited it out together. It was horribly, obnoxiously cheesy.

He deleted it. Then he grabbed his keys and left. For once, the subway was more or less on time (he'd started noticing when it was after their recent Brooklyn adventure), but before going to the precinct, on an impulse he walked down the street and picked up a couple coffees. The barista got it started when she spotted him from the door. They shared a joke. They laughed. Then he took the coffees and left. He forgot the joke before he made it out.

When the elevator dinged open, it let in a rush of sound. The 12th was hectic, electrified into action by Scott Dunn and the trail of bodies he'd already left behind him, and, as usual, Kate Beckett was at the center of it. He glimpsed her through the bullpen cage, file in one hand and phone in the other. She still had that look on her face.

Not for the first time, he wondered what path they were sliding down, and what they'd find along the way. But as he approached her, he suddenly knew where it would end. He'd known it when he'd looked into her eyes back in Ossining. Maybe that was why he'd left. He wondered if he could do anything about it.

She hung up and pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers, screwing shut her eyes. He walked up to her, and when she opened her eyes again, he made sure the first thing she saw was him.

He smiled. It was a reflex.

She managed a small one back. "Hey, Castle," she said softly.

"Got you coffee," he said.

She looked down at them. She was so tense he could practically hear her muscles creak. It suddenly occurred to him that caffeine probably wasn't high on the list of Things Kate Beckett Needs In Her Life Right Now At This Moment.

But she took it from him anyway. Drank. Then she walked around to the side of her desk and sat, gaze fixed on the board. It was already filled with notes and pictures.

He followed her and leaned on the desk beside her. He glanced all over the board, then around it, at the officers coming and going. "How long've you been back?" he asked.

She glanced at her watch, "Uh, half an hour?"

He nodded. After they'd found Sharp, they'd spent a good hour looking through his place, but found nothing connecting him to Dunn, and even less indicating why he hadn't also been killed in the van. The guy seemed boring in every respect. Crappy neighborhood. No pets. No family photographs on the walls. The center of his living room was an old CRT TV and his coffee table had a half empty bag of Doritos. So, you know, boring. He felt bad for the guy, and not just because he was dead.

"You find anything after I left?"

Beckett spoke without taking her eyes off the board, "Nothing popped during the canvas. Apparently, the neighbors didn't hear a door getting kicked in or the two gunshots, so..." her voice trailed off.

"TV too loud, right?"

She shrugged, "Something like that. After the interviews I went back to his apartment to look around some more, ran into Lanie. She said he died before the escape, probably by several hours. Checked around— his wallet and ID is missing." She looked at him.

"You're thinking our accomplice impersonated him to get into the prison?" he guessed her thoughts.

Her hair was shining in the dusk. "Precisely," she said. She had that look in her eyes again. "I was on the phone with Sharp's sister when you came in. Ryan and Esposito drove down to Riverdale to meet with Officer Reyes' parents. Falk's family should be here in a few hours." She lifted her cup to her lips but seemed to change her mind about drinking it halfway there. "You know he was married? His wife's pregnant."

Castle felt a little razor cut into his stomach, for Falk's pregnant wife, for the guard who hadn't been able to finish his Doritos, for the phone calls his partner had just had to make. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to sooth everything and the world away, but he knew that wasn't going to happen, so he kept his hands to himself and opened his mouth instead, "Lanie doing the autopsies now?"

She shook her head, "She's still in Ossining. Supposed to call when she gets back."

"So we've got nothing," he said.

"Nothi—" her desk phone cut in, and she broke off abruptly, swiveled where she sat, and reached for it. "Beckett," she said, voice bordering on brusque. After a pause, her eyebrows furrowed and she slid off the desk. "What?" she said.

Dread flowed into Castle's stomach like someone had taken dynamite to some internal dam. 'Dunn?' he mouthed, standing and walking to her.

She shook her head, once. Any relief Castle may have felt by that response was negated by the expression on her face. "You're sure?" she demanded. Pause. "No, that's...thank you for calling." Short pause. "Yeah."

She dropped the receiver in its cradle. "Fantastic," she said to no one in particular.

He was almost afraid to ask, but ask he did, "Who was that?"

"Sing Sing," she replied. Left it there.

"And?" he prompted.

She looked at him. "And apparently security was hacked this morning. The prison can't send us their footage, because it doesn't exist."

He just stared at her, suddenly at a loss for words. He couldn't think of anything appropriate to say.

"Shit," she said.

Except that.

Several seconds passed before she dropped into her chair, then reached for the phone. Castle watched her, brows dipping.

"Who're you calling?" he asked.

"Calling him back," she replied.

"Why?"

She looked up at him. Her eyes betrayed that treacherous, reckless gleam that had so scared him before, and it still scared him now. "Officer Zehner," she said. "We may not have cams, but we have his eyes. We'll get a sketch of our killer by the end of the night if I have to personally drive an artist up there and extract it myself."

He watched her as she typed in the number and brought the phone to her ear, then sat in his chair. Dusk was piquing, and both Beckett and the precinct were awash in a gold far warmer than the weather or the mood would suggest.

He sighed and reached for his coffee. This morning seemed a long time ago, and like it belonged to somebody else.

* * *

The air was so frigid when it blasted her face that it felt like someone above had dumped a bucket of ice water out over her head. Of course, no one had, but Robin still felt chilled to the bone as she swore and shifted her turtleneck a little higher over her throat with gloved fingers. The Thai place had seemed almost stuffy when she'd ducked in, inspired in equal parts by a desire to eat and to get out of the cold, but as she stood there on the street, she found herself battling with the desire to go back in and order something else. Ultimately, she decided against it, and she headed down 3rd instead, just wanting to get to the grey line so she could just make it home. It'd been a long day, and her papaya salad and her soup hadn't improved it as much as she had hoped it would.

The steps to the station were wet and slippery when she reached them, and the air was no warmer underground. As she slipped through the turnstile, her thoughts came to rest somewhere between her space heater and her other space heater. She was going to turn on the one that wasn't in the bathroom by her bed, and then she was going to sit in front of it in her fuzzy, blue bathrobe, wrapped in her fuzzier, gold blanket. She would sit there until the feeling in her fingers and the tip of her nose returned, until she was sweating, until she felt like she was sitting in a furnace, because she hated the cold. And she would make a nice hot chocolate too, from one of those weird little pops she'd bought on Carmine and 6th last week.

The train screamed its entrance a second before she spotted the lights, and she half ran to the doors as they opened. The train was boiling hot inside, as hot as she'd dreamed her space heater would be, and she dropped gratefully into a seat as other people streamed on and off. Most of the ones who'd come in were already loosening their coats, but Robin kept hers tight and buttoned, letting the heat saturate through the layers.

She was just so damn sick of the cold.

She settled back. Nine stops to home. To her space heater. To her hot chocolate.

After a beat, she unpocketed her phone. Swiped it on. Pressed the Tetris button.

Zoned. Some underappreciated part of her soul kept track of the stops after the train lurched forward, since the rest of her was too focused on twisting and dropping the little, colored blocks. She was sick of thinking about work, about Jenny and her latest issue, about living in that rut between relationships. If she could afford the pet deposit this month, she'd be halfway to the pound to get a dog.

The train screeched to a stop, and when the doors flung open she could feel the cold nip into the car. She shivered, happy when they shut again. For some reason she thought of her asshole of a brother, who'd had the sense to move to warm, sunny Florida. Days like this, she wished she had joined him. He had dogs too. Three of them. No deposit bull for him.

Her blocks hit the ceiling when the train hit her stop, and she reluctantly got to her feet with a few other people. She was the last to step out, regloving and shivering as she stepped back into the cold. Some guy was playing a guitar halfway down the station, and she spared a moment to wonder at how his fingers hadn't frozen off before he was drowned out by the roar of the train pulling away. Then she headed for the stairs.

The steps were wet and slippery, the station smellier than usual. She knew before exiting the turnstile what would be awaiting her above, and so it wasn't of any surprise at all to find it raining, hard and freezing, when she reached the surface. She took her umbrella from its little plastic slip in her purse, then cracked it out like a whip before she'd reached the top step. Once topside, she headed down the street at a brisk walk, feeling the heat she'd stored from the subway blow and drain away in less than a moment, leaving her colder than she'd felt back on the island.

She thought of Florida as she walked, of her brother and his shiny, new wife, out sunbathing in the warmth. Just a week there had been enough to make her forget the city's biting cold, and for the fourth time in fewer days she found herself wondering why she hadn't spared more time for a longer visit. She could almost picture herself out on their porch, in the hammock someone had given them as a wedding gift, swinging gently to the sound of crickets, beer in hand.

So distracting was the image, and so low had she let her umbrella droop, that she barely even noticed the guy walking the other way until they stumbled into each other.

"Oh," she said, jerking backward. Rain spattered into her hair. Her shoulder pinched under a button. "I'm sorry, I wasn't—"

"It's okay," the guy said, backing off. His hands were in his pockets, face shrouded under a hood. She could just make out a goatee.

They stood there awkwardly for a second, and then Robin started forward again. Home was the next building over, up a few flights of stairs. She was just a key turn and a power switch away from warmth.

And warmth was what she wanted. Because it was cold. And her lips felt numb.

Warmth and chocolate.

Space heater. What had Jenny said?

She stumbled in a drop in the road, umbrella bucking. Rain washed down her hair and her face. Something, her stomach...

And that guy again...

Was there a salad?

Grey.

...

Her apartment was freezing. Freezing, freezing, freezing, and she'd lost her blanket. She didn't even remember if she'd gotten to the space heater. Her legs felt cramped.

Shivering, she reached around for her blanket. Her fingers hit her wall. She felt around with her toes for it, and it was a full second before it occurred to her she was still wearing her shoes, and that her toes felt stiff and frozen.

She drew her knee up and it slammed into something.

_What the frilly_...

Her eyes popped open, but she saw nothing. Just perfect blackness, in all directions. It suddenly occurred to her she wasn't laying on her pillow, or on her bed.

_So where the fuck was she?_

Something cold and slithery and horrible bloomed in her chest, and her skin prickled. She reached around, but her fingers hit a wall. When she kicked out she hit another wall. And when she reached up to touch the ceiling, she realized it was cold, cold like ice, and she could feel something melt under her fingernail. Fear passed through her in cool sheets, like waves.

_Jesus Christ..._

She kicked again, hard, but nothing gave. She kicked at the ceiling then, but other than a distant, tinny sort of rattle, nothing happened. No light.

She was in a box.

Tears sprang unbidden. She remembered half a hundred scenes from half a hundred crime shows. Remembered fake detectives in a fake version of the city, fake, fake, fake, everything fake. This wasn't fake.

She kicked again. Punched. Screamed. She was drowning in fear. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt.

_Where was she? Oh God, oh Jesus..._

And then she froze, hearing a voice.

"I'd like to report a murder."

Her blood turned to ice. There was a long, extended pause, and she laid there frozen, trying to figure out what that meant, what the hell he was talking about, because he couldn't be talking about _her—_

"That is, unless you can find her first."

* * *

Ryan and Esposito bowed away from Tim and Patricia Reyes with as much grace and speed as they could manage. The Reyes' hadn't been close, but it was only a few weeks past New Year's, and apparently they'd begun to smooth over their emotional canyons over the holidays. Their questions and sobs followed Ryan from the apartment to the street, even as his pulse tapped a steady beat in his ears. _Why him? Why now?_

"Tell me again what she said," he said as he slipped into the driver's seat.

Esposito slammed his door. "She said Dunn called her," he said. "She said to get to the Bronx, now. 1756, 48th Avenue, third floor. She said to use the lights."

Ryan turned over the engine. His partner hit the sirens, and they peeled away.

From here, the drive would be a good twenty minutes, but Ryan rode the gas, determined to make it fifteen.

"What do you think they found?" he asked, swerving around a BMU.

"I almost don't want to know, bro," Esposito said.

"Yeah," he said, "me either."

That was the last they said to each other for the next sixteen minutes, until Ryan found the street they were looking for. He found Beckett's car parked half on the sidewalk, and he pulled in behind it. Both of them got out at the same time.

"That doesn't bode well," Esposito said the obvious, nodding at her car. The trunk was open wide.

"I don't see any uniforms," Ryan said, glancing around. "She come alone?"

"Well, you know Beckett," he said and shut his door.

"Yeah," he muttered to himself.

They made eye contact for a second, then hustled to the entrance, guns drawn. Suddenly, Ryan wasn't sure what exactly they were walking into. Tigers and freezers ran through his head as they took the stairs two at a time, but before he'd had time to really process those thoughts, they had reached the third floor. There they paused, as if both unsure they really wanted to enter. Then Ryan opened the door and poked his head in.

What he saw first was all the shadows and the boxes. The place was dark as hell, with any number of places a bad guy could hide, and the only thing that made him feel better about it was the service pistol in his hands.

"Beckett?" he called softly.

Esposito stepped in after him. "Beckett?" he tried, louder.

"Here," they heard her voice and turned toward it as one. There weren't enough syllables in her response to make any sort of reading, but he felt dread flood chest anyway. They walked forward, but stopped again when they found her.

She was just standing in the center of the room, her back to them, staring down at a heap at her feet. Ryan glanced around as he holstered his pistol, looking for and quickly spotting Castle, whose face was stony. They made eye contact for a moment, and Castle clenched his jaw, then went back to staring at Beckett.

"He called me," Beckett said, voice sounding strangely calm and disconnected. "He called my cell. Right as I was leaving Falk's wife. He all but told me where I needed to go. But we didn't figure it out in time. I was too late."

"Beckett," Esposito said, walking forward. Ryan went with him, and he felt his blood go cold when he recognized the lump at her feet as a person. A woman.

"We tried. She begged me to help, but it was..." she trailed off. "We tried."

The two detectives joined her at either shoulder. She wasn't crying, but she looked like she had been, at some point. There was grime and blood on her khaki jacket. Not hers. The woman's. She was still staring down at her, arms hugging her chest.

Ryan looked down too.

She looked asleep. Except for her bloodied fingers, she looked asleep. Peaceful. But that was wrong. She couldn't be peaceful. She was missing a fingernail.

Then he noticed the ice chest right in front of him. The lid was thrown back, and he saw a cut padlock on the floor, right beside a pair of bolt cutters. Along the lid were bloody scratches, red on snow white ice. And her fingernail.

Jesus.

"Beckett," Castle said, suddenly beside them. "Kate, come on."

Ryan and Esposito brushed eyes and stepped back, silently agreeing to give the two their space. They watched as Castle slowly worked to coax Beckett away from the dead woman. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she hadn't moved from where she stood since...what? She'd pulled her out of the box? Finally, she allowed him to turn her away. The detectives and the writer moved in a little clump toward the window, where she separated from them again to lean against the wall near a window.

They stood there for a moment, listening to the sound of distant sirens. They weren't heading in this direction. Life went on. Ryan kicked a spent cigarette off his shoe.

"So, start over," Esposito said eventually. "What happened?"

"Dunn called," Beckett said. She was barely visible in the shadows. "Mentioned our unfinished business. Gave me the chance to find her and to save her. We realized when we couldn't trace his call that he must have meant us to return to a past crime scene."

"Or an almost crime scene," Castle added.

Ryan and Esposito looked between the two of them, neither knowing what they were talking about.

"This is where he held Agent Shaw," Beckett supplied after a beat. "Where he tried to shoot me. And there," she gestured across the street, at another building, "is where he tried to blow up Agent Shaw's entire unit."

Ryan swallowed as recognition hit. He'd never been here. He'd only gotten the cliff notes from Beckett after-the-fact, and at the trial. He vaguely remembered the photographs. He wondered if they'd been taken where he was standing.

"So we came here," she continued. "Found the ice chest. Found his message."

"Message?" Ryan asked.

" 'Kate,' " she said her name as if it wasn't her own.

Stunned silence.

They all thought the same thing. Castle said it, finally, "Last time it was Nikki. 'Nikki will burn.' "

She said nothing, looked out the window at her back.

"He's coming after you now," Esposito said.

"He was coming after me before," she said, never turning.

"But now it's your name," Ryan said.

She started to say something, then blew the breath away in a long, grey stream. Her profile was a hard line of dull yellow and shadow. Castle spoke in her silence, "We just had this conversation." From his tone, it had gone nowhere.

Ryan decided to drop it. "What happened next?" he asked.

"We found the message," Castle said when Beckett didn't reply. "We saw the padlock on the chest. We heard..." he paused, "We heard her, calling out. Beckett told me to get the bolt cutters from the car. I got them, we cut the lock, opened it up—"

"She was dead when I pulled her out," Beckett cut in quietly. "I tried to bring her back. Paramedics got here and they tried, but it was too late. I was standing here when she died. I couldn't hear what she was saying to me, but I told her everything was going to be okay."

Ryan felt like someone had taken a massive vacuum to the building and sucked all the air out of it. He'd stood in hundreds of rooms where awful things had occurred, cracked jokes while standing over the scenes of terrible tragedy, but this felt...worse. Personal.

"Do we know who she is?" he asked.

Beckett looked at him, "No. She didn't have any ID."

"You call Lanie?"

"Yeah," she nodded, smiled humorlessly. "She only just got back from Ossining." She turned from them to look out the window again, this time to be lost almost entirely to the shadows. "Dunn doesn't waste any time."

Watching her, Ryan felt both helpless and useless. So after a moment he left them to look at the body again. Esposito followed. Castle didn't.

"We've gotta stop this asshole," Esposito murmured, quietly enough that only they could hear it.

"How many crime scenes does this make today?" Ryan said, equally as hushed. "Three? Four bodies?"

"I don't want to find anymore," he replied. "We've gotta get an ID on her. Gotta find her connection to Dunn."

He stared down at her. She was wearing a pant suit and flats. "She looks like she was taken after work," he said.

"Yeah."

He blew out a breath. It was cold enough that he could see it. "Poor girl."

At least two minutes passed before it occurred to him that he was standing in the exact spot Beckett had stood before, and he nervously moved away, pulling out his phone.

"I'm going to call Lanie," he said. "See how far away she is."

"She probably wo—" Esposito started to say, then stopped. "Yeah, okay," he said.

Ryan walked away then, knowing his phone call would accomplish nothing, but not caring. He couldn't stand there and stare at her face anymore. He could barely stand to stay in the building.

By the time he'd made it to the door, the medical examiner had already arrived.

* * *

"Cause of death: asphyxiation."

Her words bounced off the plastic, the chrome, the tile, and the steel. Everything was bright under the fluorescence; all light and no shadow. Here, time lost its context. The only real indicator of the hour was how many people were in the building. She knew it was late, because they were the only two here.

Beckett shifted her weight, gaze focused in front of her. Lanie was closing. She didn't know how long she'd been standing there, but when she moved the soles of her feet ached from standing on her heels so long. She pushed the feeling away., opting to remain on her feet. If Castle was here, he might have told her that she was inventing some form of punishment for herself, but he wasn't, even if she could all but hear his voice in her ear.

She watched as Lanie sewed Jane Doe up, and as she pulled the sheet up over her body and her face. As she smoothed it over, she wondered at the use of the white sheet, at how clean it always looked despite what it covered. The thought slipped away as Lanie peeled off her gloves and tossed them, then turned to face her.

"Thank you," she said again, before the ME could speak.

Lanie nodded.

Beckett had asked her to do the autopsy tonight, despite the hour and despite the other bodies they'd recovered today. She could've said no — she had probably wanted to — but she'd agreed. Beckett had stayed at the scene through to the recovery, then left the boys at the precinct while she went down to the morgue to meet Lanie and their Jane Doe. She'd walked in and stopped, and there she'd stayed: numb, unable to bring herself to move or look away. That was where she stood now. She hadn't changed her coat.

"You heard everything I said?" Lanie asked, and she nodded. "Any questions about my findings?"

"No," she said.

They stood there for a moment. Lanie was studying her, and Beckett met her eyes, unwilling to look away. All she'd gotten today were people asking how she was, and she knew it was coming from her friend now. She could practically see the numbers counting down.

_3..2..1.._

"If I asked how you were feeling, would you tell me?"

_Ding!Ding!Ding!_

"No," she said.

She nodded, "That's what I thought."

Beckett worked her molars for a moment, opened her mouth, "I'm going to go back," she said. "I really appreciate you doing this for me, Lanie."

"Like I said, it's no problem."

Beckett glanced at the gurney again, at the sheet, then said good night as she turned and left. She barely heard the ME's reply as the doors swung shut behind her.

As she headed back to the precinct, she replayed the autopsy in her mind, pulling out the pertinents. Jane Doe was somewhere in her late 20s, bottle-blonde, green eyes, 5'4", 143 pounds, healthy, no BAC, no past fractures or medical devices, Tweetie tattoo on her left ankle. From her clothing and her damp hair, she'd probably been taken on her way back from work. If she'd been carrying ID, Dunn had taken it from her before putting her in the box. They had nothing to identify her with.

She wondered if they'd ever know her name. She wondered if Dunn knew it.

She took the stairs up to the 12th, despite the ache in her feet (_more guilt assuagement, Kate_?),and when she opened the door, the first thing that struck her was that it was so quiet, and the second was that it was so empty. She walked to her desk and was about to fall into her chair when she noticed movement in one of the meeting rooms. Maybe the precinct wasn't as empty as she thought. Ignoring the protests of her feet, she headed there instead.

And there she found her faithful little team, grouped around the table and surrounded by papers, soda cans, a pizza box, and what looked like mug books. The TV was on, and she recognized the van from Ossining on it. Security footage from the parking lot.

Castle was the first to notice her. "Beckett," he said. Everyone looked up as he stood.

"Hey," she said, then glanced at her two detectives. "Anything?"

They shook their heads. "No," Ryan said.

"Not yet," Esposito modified.

Whatever hope she might've felt died in her chest. Nodding, she pulled out one of the chairs across from them, finally allowing herself to sit. Castle sat too. "What're you doing?" she asked.

"That sketch from Zehner came in," Ryan said. He grabbed a paper off the table and held it out. She took it. "We've just been looking through our mug books, trying to see if maybe we can find him in here."

It was then that she knew they had nothing.

"What about the security footage?" she asked.

"They're just blobs," Castle said. "Albeit, vaguely human-shaped."

"Did you see the car they switched to?"

"Not much. It's a sedan."

"Light-colored," Esposito added.

She stared at their exhausted expressions. They were waiting for her reply, maybe hoping she had come with some glowing insight from the morgue. "Then we have nothing," she said, running her fingers through her hair.

"What about the autopsy?" Castle asked.

She looked at him. Dropped her hands. "No ID, no trace."

No one said anything. Beckett looked down at the table and the mug books. It felt like such a shot in the dark, one made blind-folded and with an 18th century flintlock, but she reached for a book and pulled it toward her anyway. "You got an extra copy of this?" she asked, holding up the sketch Ryan had handed her.

He hesitated, then nodded.

"Got a list of possibles?"

"I've got it," Castle said. He lifted up and waggled a yellow legal pad, then held it out.

She took it. Looked at the long list of scrawl in all their handwriting. Placed it back on the table.

Then she cracked open the mug book and started scanning pictures.

Here, at least, time had some semblance of meaning. It was dark through the windows, and it was dark in most of the precinct. She at least knew it was night. A glance at her watch between pages told her it was well after midnight.

This morning seemed like a long time ago.

She added her first name to the list. She was in the process of adding a third when somebody's phone went off. She jumped, and the "g" for "Grange" shot up through "Byrd" and "Reinso."

It was a full second before she realized it was Ryan's phone and not her own.

He answered it, then jumped to his feet. "Jenny," he said, quickly making his way out of the room. "No, I—I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was so late..." his voice receded as he walked away, and Beckett looked back down at the mug book, smoothing the page with a hand she didn't realize was shaking.

She balled it into a fist and moved it to her lap, willing no one to have noticed.

No one had.

Four photographs later, Ryan walked back in the room. He looked at Beckett, apologetically, almost a little guiltily. "I'm sorry," he said. "That was Jenny. She wants me to come home."

She glanced at her watch. 1:39. "Jeez," she muttered. "No, go home. You've more than done your part." She stood. Pain shot through her heels, but she ignored it. "Espo, you too. We're just treading water anyway."

Esposito looked at her. "You're sure?"

"Yeah," she said. "This can wait until the morning."

He didn't argue with her. He almost looked relieved as he got to his feet. Ryan walked around him and grabbed his jacket, then put it on. They headed to the door together. "You coming?" Esposito asked, stopping.

"Yeah, eventually," she lied. "I want to finish up here first."

She didn't know if he believed her, but they said their goodbyes, and then they left. She fell back into her chair, then went back to the books. Several moments passed before she realized Castle hadn't done the same.

"Something on your mind?" she asked when she got sick of him staring at her.

"Why do I get the feeling you're not going home?" he said.

She looked at him. She hated the worry she saw there. Hated that look on his face like he just wanted to fix her, to save her from herself (_because you don't want to be saved_)_. _Because that wasn't something he was capable of doing, wasn't his responsibility, wasn't his right (_it's just because he cares._)

God, she was tired.

"I'll go home," she said. "I just need some more time, alright?" She looked back at the page. She wanted him to drop it.

He didn't. "You said it yourself. We're just treading water."

"Well, sometimes that's just what we do, and we hope that eventually we'll find a little spit of beach." Please, drop it.

"You don't believe you'll find that here anymore than I do."

Something inside her snapped. She looked up. "Well, you know what, Castle? There's no one saying you need to be here. You're free to go, anytime." All the rage and the grief and the guilt ran hot and giggling through her veins, like a dam had cracked. Suddenly, she felt like the one who was suffocating.

He looked like she'd slapped him.

Her stomach clenched up, through the turbulence and the roar of her blood. "I'm sorry," she said, rubbing her eyes. Inhaled. "It's just...it's just been a long day."

He got up, and she felt him lean against the table beside her. "Not just for you. I was in that warehouse too, in case you've forgotten," he stopped. She met his eyes again, feeling a fresh pang of guilt. His face softened, "Come on, Kate, just come home with me. Like you said, this can wait until the morning."

She swallowed. "I just need to be here right now, okay? I just need a little more time."

"Then I'll stay with you." He said it with such conviction. She felt her heart constrict.

"Castle, I..." she started to say, broke off. She could read the hurt all over his face, even as a hundred billion little neurons in her brain started begging for him to just get away. (_Can't breathe. Where had all the air gone?_)

"Okay," he said and smiled. It was sad and small, and it didn't reach his eyes. "I hear you, Beckett. I'll go."

Sharp little blades cut at her heart as he rose and grabbed his coat. Someone else —a better, smarter person — might have stopped him then, but she just watched as he put it on.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he said. "You'll get some sleep?"

"Yeah," she said, nodding.

He kissed her then, not deeply or passionately, maybe just to convey all the things he couldn't say, that she wouldn't want to hear if he tried, and then he was gone.

She sat there, staring at the empty, open doorway, listening to his footsteps get farther and farther away. She thought about stopping him, saw herself closing the book and chasing after him, catching him just as the elevator doors opened, going home with him and accepting his safety and his concerns, falling asleep in the warmth and the quiet and the peace, drowning all thought—for just a couple hours—of Jane Doe trapped in that ice box, calling out for her, forgetting her name carved on the lid, as if her death was both a gift and a promise.

But instead she looked down and flipped the page. Continued to listen to the screams echo in her head.


	3. We Have a Map of the Piano

Chapter Three: We Have a Map of the Piano

* * *

It used to make her smile when the stiffs at the TSA pinged her gun. She wouldn't warn them before she went through the scanner that she was carrying. It used to give her some weird jolt of satisfaction to watch how quickly their expressions morphed into fear when she pulled out her shield and announced to all the world: F. B. I., Special Agent Jordan Shaw. Then it was Jordan Shaw, Special Agent In Charge. And then one day she just flashed her shield and didn't bother even going through the scanner. That had probably been sometime around her 40th birthday.

Avery liked to do it though. Then again, he was still young.

She sighed wistfully. She remembered young. When the world had been an oyster she couldn't wait to crowbar open. When she'd been the Bureau's rising star. But then she got married. And then she had a kid. And then the jackets at the department stores started asking about senior discounts. And then her husband and her daughter moved to Portland. And then she didn't move to Portland.

"At least it's a short flight."

She glanced at Special Agent Jason Avery, who had taken the window seat without her permission. "That it is," she agreed.

"But you weren't thinking about that."

She smiled. "You'll never know."

Avery snorted and went back to staring out the window. Shaw went back to pretending she was reading some fascinating examination on the merits of plaid table linen. They'd already had their discussion about Scott Dunn yesterday, and they'd both mutually, if silently, agreed that neither was interested in discussing their feelings on the matter. It'd been years and several hostage crises since Dunn had kidnapped her from her own car and attempted to blow up half her squad. They were over it.

She scratched the scar where Dunn had pistol-whipped her with her own service weapon.

They were mostly over it.

She leaned back in her seat, listening to the not-so-distant cries of a toddler. About four seconds into the scream, a second entered the chorus, and once again she found herself wondering why she had such an aversion to iPods.

She looked at Avery, considering the possibility of conversation, but he was sneaking buds into his ears, watching baggage vehicles drive around the tarmac.

Traitor.

He was probably listening to that shitty country crap he had somehow convinced himself she enjoyed too.

She flipped the page of her magazine. Looked at the Sasquatch garden figurine. Wondered for the hundredth time why the hell anyone would want that thing in their yard.

It'd be an hour before they touched down in New York, maybe another half before they reached the 12th. She had yet to call Detective Beckett for an update. The assumption was that if he'd been caught, she'd have been called, and she hadn't been called. Not that she had become allergic to bad news in her advanced age—hell, her life lately had devolved into one long series of it—but for once she was content to wait until she arrived on scene before watching everything implode. And burn.

Her thoughts dragged back to New Years. To the case file she'd been forced to file away yesterday. Somehow, she had a feeling that whatever they were flying into wouldn't turn out much better.

Before she could go there again, the pilot's voiced beeped in over the speakers, politely telling them they were ready for take-off, and to please remember to belt in and switch off your electronics, and thanks for choosing to fly with us.

She pulled one of the buds out of Avery's ear. Sure enough, she could just make out that annoying, tinny twang.

"Well, you heard the captain," she said. "It's time for lift-off."

* * *

Castle gave up on sleep at some point around five, but didn't leave his bedroom until well after seven. He just laid in his bed in starfish position, dressed but for the suit jacket and the shoes, staring up at the ceiling, wondering at what he could have done yesterday.

If he'd reached the crowbar faster...

If he'd insisted Beckett take a different route...

If he'd just figured it out...if _they_ had just figured it out sooner...

Should he have left her there, alone?

What if he hadn't?

Why the hell had he tripped on the stairs?

Why hadn't they guessed it sooner?

_Nikki will burn._

_Kate..._

What was the rest of Dunn's message?

Did he want to know?

If he hadn't tripped, and if only he'd reached that crowbar...

Round and round he spun in the Gravitron of his thoughts, stomach stuck to his spine, afraid to leave his bedroom because Alexis always got up at six and he didn't want her to read him.

He kept checking his phone, wondering if Beckett might call him, but the damn thing remained mute, silently judging him behind its wall of apps. He placed it on his forehead, tossed it on the bed, picked it up again, started to dial, threw it away again.

He missed her. He missed yesterday morning, last week. He ached to touch her, to hear her laugh.

_Nikki will burn._

_Kate will burn..._

It was the impending threat of a dead battery that finally propelled him out of bed and into the kitchen in search of the charger. His daughter was already there, making an omelet and four strips of bacon.

"Hey," she greeted, looking well-rested and lightly suspicious.

"Hey," he said, putting on his best Everything Is Fine In The Land Of Dad face. "Seen the phone charger?"

"On the counter," she said, pointing behind her. "You can unplug mine."

"Thanks." He occupied himself with the activity of unplugging and replugging, as methodical as a bomb tech, and when he turned he found Alexis staring at him with those scary, laser beam eyes that made him feel like someone had stenciled his every last foible and transgression across his forehead.

"You got home late last night," she said, kicking open the door with all the subtly of a cop on an actual door.

"Yeah," he agreed.

She studied him for a moment, then pulled something off the counter beside her. A newspaper. She held it out to him, and he took it, knowing as he did what it was going to say.

"Nice picture," she said.

He looked down.

There on the front page was a grainy, color shot of the van in the strip mall. He could just make out himself and Beckett beside him. Even through the paper and the ink, he could still feel the heat of her gaze, could still feel the bite of yesterday's chill, could still see the dead cop, staring at him with one, blank eye.

"You didn't tell me when you rushed off yesterday that it was to chase after Scott Dunn," Alexis cut through the memory, tearing him from the parking lot and dropping him back in his kitchen. He didn't have time to think up an adequate response before she continued, "I remembered him when I read the name, though even if I hadn't, the paper does a good job summarizing all the major points." As she said it, she slid her omelet onto her plate.

"I should have told you," he admitted.

She tonged the bacon onto a folded paper napkin. "Yeah, you should have." Patted out the oil. "How's Beckett?"

A loaded question if ever there was one. "I don't know," he replied honestly.

"Is he targeting her again?"

The ice box crashed through his brain. When he blinked, he saw her name cut roughly in the lid, saw Beckett open it, saw the dead woman. Heard his partner telling her she was going to be okay over and over as she pulled her out and laid her on the concrete. Her bloody fingers. But Alexis didn't need to know that. "Yeah," was all he said.

There was a long beat of silence.

"Do I need to be worried?" she asked finally. "For either of you?"

He thought of Beckett again, tired and alone in the meeting room, about his own sleepless night. _Kate will burn. _"I don't know," he said.

She stared at him, with an intensity that he used to think would make her President or Chief Justice or some title with a dozen capital letters to back it up (and he still thought that), because even when she was five she seemed so much smarter than he was. Then she walked closer, and she hugged him. Not desperately or anything. But he was surprised.

Then he hugged her back. Felt his shoulders ease as some of the guilt melted away.

"I love you," she said. "But sometimes I worry."

"I love you too," he said.

She released him, then gestured at the bacon. "You can have that. There's coffee too."

He smiled, "Thank you."

She nodded and sat at the bar. He grabbed the bacon and sat beside her, and then he steered the conversation away from himself. Alexis told him about the hipster art film she'd attended with Molly, Bridge, Jessica, and Buttons, about a fancy cafe down in Greenwich that had tea sandwiches and little crème-filled pastries, about a skirt she'd seen in the window of a consignment shop and bought for $22.55. He asked her again if she was glad she'd opted not to take classes over the interim, and she said yes. By then he'd long since finished the bacon and had made an omelet of his own (plain; he didn't really feel up for a smorelet this morning).

He was cleaning up the kitchen when she stopped at the stairs and turned back. "Will you be home tonight?" she asked.

He hesitated. He was sure that he wouldn't, but he chickened out when he spoke, "I don't know."

She nodded. If she was disappointed or angry or something in between, she internalized it. He wondered if she was spending too much time around Beckett. "Okay," she said. "Well, I'll be home. Call if you think you'll make dinner." She paused. "Call if you think you won't."

He nodded. "I promise."

"Bye," she said and started up the steps.

"Bye," he called after her, listening to her footfalls. Then he stood in his empty, spotless kitchen and glanced back at his phone. It was still silent. He wasn't sure what he was expecting, what he'd been expecting most of the night (though if he was honest with himself, he'd been expecting— _hoping_ she would show up at his door), but it was twenty after eight and without his daughter's tales of her adventures in the Village, he wasn't sure he could stand to hang around here anymore.

So he unplugged his phone, changed, and left for the precinct. It was before her shift start, but he knew she would be there. As usual, he stopped at the Starbucks on the way, got the coffees extra hot so they would stay warm in the chill, and he walked to the 12th. When the elevator doors opened, he stepped out and started scanning for her. He found her almost immediately, slouched at her desk, hair fanned down her back and in front of her face.

He thought she might have been asleep until he got closer and realized she was just staring at a sheet of paper, fingers slowly massaging her temple. There was a half empty mug of coffee at her elbow.

Just seeing her filled him with a weird sort of warmth.

"Hey," he greeted, thinking it sounded so much less optimistic than 'Good morning.'

Beckett looked up at him. Her expression was somewhere between tired and defeated. "Hey," she said.

She had changed clothes, finally taken off the bloody jacket, but she hadn't made it home. He knew that because she could practically open a mid-sized boutique out of the stuff she kept in her locker and the bottom drawer of her desk. And she hadn't slept. That much he didn't doubt.

No, he was certain she'd been sitting here since he'd left, doing...god knew what.

"That for me?" she asked.

"What? Oh, yeah," he handed her one of the coffees he'd forgotten he was holding, then sat in his chair beside her. She drank long and deep, and when she finally put the cup down, her face was flushed and her eyes were bleary from the heat.

"Thanks," she said, voice husky. She blinked a few times, then drank again.

He nodded. "So, you find anything?"

She shook her head. "Prison sent me a list of all the people who've either called or visited Dunn since he was incarcerated." She leaned back, rolled her neck. It cracked loudly. "Mostly lawyers, couple writers. No friends. Doesn't have any family."

"Writers?" he repeated.

"You noticed," she said. "Yeah, a couple true crime novelists. Apparently they wanted to write a book about him."

He thought about those creepy manuscripts they'd found in Dunn's apartment, right across from the even creepier Wall of Beckett.

_Kate will burn._

"A few years ago there were some TV people there," she continued, oblivious to his thoughts. "Apparently they did a _Dateline_ episode on him." And then she smiled, cruelly, at some private memory. "I forgot until I read the name that they called me. Tried to ask what it felt like when Dunn blew up my place." The smile faded, and she leaned forward again. Rubbed her face. "I'm sorry I snapped at you last night."

Castle blinked at her sudden apology, then physically made a "pfft" gesture even though she wasn't looking at him. "Don't worry about it," he said.

She let her palms fall to the table as she met his eyes. "You sleep at all?"

"No," he said. And even though he knew, he asked, "You?"

"No," her voice was flat.

They sat there for a long moment. She turned back to her sheet of paper, and he stared at the whiteboard, hoping to have some sort of Castle Case-Breaking RevelationTM that would turn the morning around. But nothing clicked, because they didn't have anything except a van and an ice box and a lot of dead bodies.

"We won't be able to stop him," Beckett said. She was still staring at the paper. "If he decides to kill again."

Her words sent an chilly finger down his spine. He couldn't see her through her hair.

"We have nothing. Not unless he hands it to us." She looked at him again, and when she did he felt that icy hand squeeze his heart. He suddenly wondered again if she truly did want to kill him.

"Beckett—" he started to say.

"You changed your hair."

Castle looked up, and his thoughts fragmented and blew away.

There, just a yard away, was Special Agent Jordan Shaw, standing on the precinct floor so still and suddenly it was as if she'd apparated there. She was smiling, grimly. Her partner (Anton? A...von...something?) was behind her.

Beckett stood and held out a hand, the vulnerability and the rage and the exhaustion gone in a moment, stuffed down to some private section of her heart. "Agent Shaw," she said. "Agent Avery." (that was it!)

"Detective Beckett."

They shook, then Beckett did the same with Avery.

Castle stood too. "Agent Shaw," he said.

She arched a brow. "So you've still got the writer monkey."

Beckett smiled, genuinely this time. "Yeah, well, you know what they say about monkeys..."

Castle played along, relieved by the chance for a joke, "They're adorable?"

"They cling." She turned back to Agent Shaw, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "So are you here to take over?"

Shaw shook her head. "I have been declared a liaison by the gods on the high. So you can relax."

And she did. A micrometer.

Until Shaw opened her mouth again. "Montgomery here yet?" she asked, glancing around as the air froze and cracked. "He said the next time I came back to the city I owed him a..." her voice trailed off when she noticed. "What?"

Beckett suddenly looked four shades paler, as if she'd just been knifed somewhere she didn't know she should have been protecting. "Come to the break room," she said after a beat, voice throaty. "We'll bring you up to speed."

Shaw's eyebrows dipped, and her gaze flicked questioningly between them before Beckett turned and walked away. The three of them followed after a pause, and Castle moved to catch up with her, a whole, fresh torrent of the images he'd fought so long to bury rushing like floodwater through his brain.

* * *

Beckett watched Jordan Shaw and Jason Avery as they talked with Gates in her office. Her heart ached dully in her chest, and she felt cold and heavy under her blazer and her turtleneck. She'd punched the crap out of the bag upstairs around 4 this morning, but all the energy she'd summoned had washed away, and at the moment she just felt low and worn. She wished she'd allowed herself to go home last night.

Castle sat beside her in his usual spot, also watching the two agents through the glass. They hadn't said anything to each other since leaving the break room, and she wondered if having to relay Montgomery's death had drained him as much as it had her. She had chosen to keep the shooting to herself, but the memories were running fresh and raw. His body on the hangar floor. That green, green cemetery grass...

She cleared her throat, trying to stop the onslaught before it could progress to anything worse. To the hospital. She should've slept.

Castle looked at her at the sound, and then after a beat he reached for her hand. "You alright?" he asked, squeezing gently. His palm was warm and smooth, and she could just smell his cologne. Despite the contact, he seemed a thousand miles away.

"Yeah," she said reflexively, looking down at his hand. "It didn't occur to me that she didn't know."

He didn't say anything for a protracted second. Then, hesitantly, "Want to talk about it?"

"No," she exhaled. "But I'd like some air." The desire surfaced as she voiced it, and she got to her feet. He released her as she turned to get her thick, wool coat off her chair back, then exchanged it for the blazer. As she buttoned she led the way to the nearest door to the balcony, and when she opened it the air hit her like a wall of ice.

Shivering, she went out to the rail and looked down. A blue and white was pulling out of the underground garage, and a few people were clustered outside the corner Starbucks across the street. The sky was dark and grey above the neighboring buildings, more distant structures blurred and formless. It was the kind of morning where only a clock could tell you the sun had risen. She wondered if Dunn was somewhere on the island, somewhere nearby. She could still remember the photographs of her plastered all over his wall, clearly taken from a nearby building.

Her gaze tore up at the thought, and she scanned windows, the hair on her neck and arms prickling. Most of the windows were drawn and covered, but she saw no one in the ones that weren't. She imagined seeing him there, locking eyes with him. Considered distantly what she'd do if she did.

Her gun was hard on her hip.

Something ugly uncurled in her chest.

"What?"

The thing retracted, and the audio came back. She realized Castle was studying her, and the look on his face was as angering as it was familiar. Worry. Always worry, creasing every line and crevice in his face. When the jokes stopped, it was always trouble.

"Nothing," she said. She suddenly wanted him closer, hated the cold swirling between them. But the distance seemed insurmountable, cavernous. And she couldn't stop the impulse to glance at the windows again. The target on her back had been repainted in bright, red ink.

"You hungry?" he asked, as if to change the subject of some non-existent conversation.

"No," she said.

"Still don't want to talk?"

"No." She started to scan the windows again, but stopped when he did it too. "I want to go back to Sing Sing," she said before he could ask what she was looking for. "Have Esposito and Ryan walk Zehner through the mug shots. And I want to talk to everyone in the neighboring cells. Somebody must know something." She slipped her hands into her pockets, not particularly relishing the thought. Lockwood's wraith still haunted the place, even if he'd died in that hangar too.

She wondered again if they'd known each other, Dunn and Lockwood. If they'd bonded over a mutual desire to kill her. She'd had the thought hours ago, as she'd leaned half-conscious on her hand, head lost in a hundred incoherent images. That was when she'd gotten up to hit the bag. It was only later that she'd remembered Lockwood had been in ad seg almost exclusively up until his escape.

It suddenly occurred to her that Castle hadn't replied, and when she looked at him she felt a little jolt of fear. He was staring at her with so much pain.

" 'Kate,' " he said it just as he'd read it last night, before they'd heard the distant, muffled sob from inside the box. "He wrote 'Kate.' "

"I know, Castle," Beckett said.

He laughed helplessly, "I don't know whether I should find your stoicism comforting or worrying."

She felt something in her heart run to milk, and she stepped toward him, reached for him. Her fingers brushed his cheek, and he looked at her miserably. It all seemed so familiar, the fear and the worry. Like they were crash victims whose planes just kept going down, over and over.

"Hey," she said softly. "I'm fine." It sounded lame even as she said it, but she wasn't sure what else to say. That Dunn couldn't kill her, because he'd already failed twice? That she'd kill him herself if— _when_ he tried? Somehow, she didn't think he'd find either sentiment comforting.

So she kissed him instead, running her hands down his face to settle on his chest. She felt warmth radiate out from their lips, felt his breath. He tasted like old coffee, like cinnamon, and just for a moment she let go, just dropped the stress and the nightmares and Brad Falk's corpse and Jane Doe's bloodied fingers, stopped feeling the cold. She felt alive and whole, safe, untouchable, loved.

And then they parted, and the world seemed that much darker for it. All of her ached as she pulled away, each inch a dagger, but she forced herself to step back. There were four dead in the morgue, and somewhere out there Dunn was finding another victim to carve his message into. She didn't have the luxury of escape.

_Kate will burn._

"Come on," she said, already feeling cold again. "I'm sure the boys are here by now." Castle nodded, looking as tired and sad as she felt. With a final glance at the windows, she turned and headed back inside, and he followed close behind.

The precinct greeted her with noise and warmth, but she made no move to take off her coat as she reentered the bullpin. The two FBI agents had left Gates' office to hover by her desk, where Esposito and Ryan had also appeared. Around them other officers and detectives swarmed, many of whom she knew were also manning the Dunn case. The phones had started ringing yesterday, but the calls were rolling in more heavily this morning, following the release of Jane Doe's picture to the media. Beckett remembered watching the story break from the precinct's work-out mat, fury and shame swirling violently in her gut as her failure was projected for all the world— for Dunn —to see. She'd argued with Gates about giving anything to the press so early, but she'd been overruled.

Her mood darkened even further at the memory, and she swept silently to her desk, to join the group that had gathered there. Conversation broke off as she came within earshot, but she didn't bother to spare a brain cell to wonder what they'd been talking about.

"Morning," Ryan said.

They exchanged brief greetings as Beckett grabbed random odds and ends off her desk, and then she relayed her plans for their morning. Ryan went to retrieve the books and the list and one of the official department iPads Castle had bought for them after he'd decided that the laptops were "so 2009" when she stopped talking, and it was at that point that she turned to Shaw. While the agent had claimed they bore equal responsibility, Beckett had too often dealt with interdepartmental liaisons to make any assumptions about what and how much she was going to shoulder.

"Will you be joining us?" she asked bluntly, feeling too tired to be anything but direct.

"If you don't mind, I'd rather stay here and go over what you have," Shaw replied. "After I go down to forensics and shove my boot up their ass, that is. I want everything we've got processed out by lunch."

Beckett nodded, unsure if she was glad for the access to federal privileges. Last time, forensics had only really served to throw them through a near endless series of loops. They'd only found Dunn when he'd wanted them to. She wasn't confident it'd be any different this time.

She didn't say that though. She just murmured her acceptance and a goodbye, then turned away from her desk to head for the elevators. Castle stuck to her like a burr as she walked, and she found herself glad for his silent support, even if he was wearing his fears as openly as an opera mask. It made her feel less exposed, somehow, or possibly just less obvious.

She stopped near the elevator to wait for Esposito and Ryan, and there she took a deep, cleansing breath, then blew it out. Counted to ten. Did it again.

Castle stood there silently: didn't smile, didn't say anything stupid or funny or distracting. For some reason, she found herself wondering why he'd stayed here with her all these years, why he'd allowed her to crush out of him so much of the youth and lightheartedness that had once so deeply pissed her off, back when he'd first clawed and blackmailed his way into her life. She thought back to the kiss on the balcony, his quiet, desperate touches, the way he'd suddenly gripped her like he was afraid she was going to evaporate.

The truth was, she knew why he had stayed, why he was still standing there. And it terrified her as much as it thrilled her.

She had almost gotten around to breaking the silence when the two other members of her team appeared, and it was with something not entirely dissimilar to relief that she hit the elevator button and walked inside the car. Though she didn't fail to notice as they rode it down how uncharacteristically not-chatty her two detectives were. She wondered gloomily as they stepped out into the garage if the two of them were as preoccupied with their ghosts as she was, or if it was just that her mood was contagious.

They parted at their cars with as little conversation as when they'd come together: which was to say, none. Exhaling, Beckett hit the unlock button as Ryan did the same two cars down, and then she climbed inside. Her car was freezing, the seats ice, and she hurriedly turned the engine over and flipped the heat as Castle got in beside her.

"I guess she left all her toys back in DC," he said as she was backing out.

Beckett glanced at him, pulling back to drive. "Yeah," she said after she had figured out what he was talking about. "Yeah, I guess she did." She tapped the gas, started rolling toward the exit.

"Last time she brought agents and smartboards, bought enough copies of _Heat Wave_ to cover my expenses for a month." He messed with the vent for a second, fell back. "But this time it's just her. Should we be taking that as a vote of confidence or something?"

She shrugged. She hadn't really thought about it. "Last time, I don't remember any of those things being particularly helpful." She glanced at the construction up the street, decided to turn early. Through her rearview she noted that Ryan didn't follow. "Maybe Agent Shaw travels lighter these days." She slowed to let a pedestrian dart past, then sped up again.

"Maybe." It was his turn to sigh. "I miss two days ago."

"Yeah," she allowed, despite herself. "I do too."

Less than two minutes later, it started to rain. As Beckett flipped the wipers, she almost questioned why she didn't believe in signs.

* * *

Sing Sing was as charming today as it had been yesterday, with its totally 80s bare-wood frames around every window and door, its airport tiling, and its concrete walls. Except for the cameras, the guards, and the bullet-proof glass, the place almost as looked as harmless as a Portland motel, complete with the front office's pine cone collection and tree-shaped air fresheners. It reminded Castle of almost every other government building he'd ever had the near universal displeasure of visiting.

That changed the second they stepped from reception to the cell block, where suddenly everything became concrete, steel bars, and chain-link, and they gained an armed escort. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, or maybe it just felt that way when he saw Beckett stiffen. He had a feeling she was recalling the four months she'd made weekly pilgrimages here, and even now he felt guilty for never once having joined her (not that he hadn't asked).

The writer and the detectives followed Brian Dobbs like ducklings down a hallway to an elevator, which they rode two floors before getting off and going down another hall. Overhead, an air-conditioning duct ran parallel to the their walk, its white paint peeling off all along the base. They ended up following it all the way to a series of steel doors, which was where Dobbs finally stopped.

" Abe Seidman is in there," he said, jabbing a finger at door number one. "He was Dunn's direct neighbor on the opposite wall. Over there is Robert Burchett, his next-door neighbor on the left."

"What're they in for?" Castle found himself asking before he could stop himself.

Dobbs looked at him, his dark eyes black under the florescence. "Burchett raped and butchered a sixteen year-old girl," he said.

"Seidman killed his parents," Beckett interjected, her expression blank and cold. "Castle and I will take him." She glanced back, "Esposito, you're with Burchett."

He nodded. He was alone, Ryan having separated at the front desk to meet with Zehner.

"Buzz me when you want your new pair of dirtbags then," the DO said.

Castle watched him walk away for a moment before he heard a door open, and then he turned to follow Beckett into the meeting room. One of their guards came in last, then stopped to stand vigil by the door, stiff as a soldier with a stick up his ass.

Beckett stopped just before the table to stare down silently at their interrogatee. Abe Seidman was lanky and gaunt, with wispy, sandy hair and an expression comparable to a man told that he had just consumed a cup of mashed slug.

"Good morning, Abe," Beckett said breezily, sounding as friendly as a live chainsaw.

'Abe' just glared at her, eyes two hard pieces of flint.

Beckett strode forward, then pulled out one of the steel, padless chairs with a screech, where she sat as if he'd invited her. "How's life?" she asked.

"Fuck you," he said, pulling as far away from her as his full-body chains would allow.

Castle hesitantly took the chair beside his partner, starting to suspect he had missed a bridge.

"I'm glad to find you've been enjoying our hospitality," she continued with a small, cruel smile. "How long's it been now?"

"Go fuck yourself," he growled.

"Seven years?" she asked, as if he hadn't spoken. "It was June. We found you a in pile of your own vomit, with the needle still stuck in your arm and the shoes you murdered them in still laced to your feet." She leaned forward, crossed her arms on the table, though there was nothing relaxed in the motion. "Yet you plead not guilty, Abe."

He said nothing.

"All for what? The money in the nightstand? They came in just as you were robbing them, right, Abe?"

Silence.

"You shot your mother first," her voice was sharp as broken glass, her body all hard, rigid angles. "Then your father. Six times. And then you went out to meet your dealer."

He flew forward, snarling, "I hope Dunn fucks you up your tight, pink ass with a knife."

Castle jumped back, the guard moved away from the door, but Beckett hadn't so much as blinked as she coolly regarded the ex-junkie murderer hanging on the edge of his chains. It was as if six feet of concrete separated her from him, instead of just a few feet of strained air. "Who said anything about Scott Dunn?" she asked.

He glared at her, then slumped back again, as if the threat had expended most of his energy.

Beckett studied him quietly for a moment, then reached into her coat. She pulled out a leather folder and her notepad, then set both on the table, unopened. And then she just looked at him, intertwining her fingers neatly over the folder.

Seidman cracked eventually, withering under her gaze. "I've got nothing to say to you," he said sullenly, studying something on the table. He sniffed. "There's nothing else you can do to me."

"Really?" Beckett asked thoughtfully, gaze unmoving. "Nothing at all?"

He looked up, his face a mask of hatred, though Castle could see fear fizzing just underneath it.

"I can think of a few things," she said, as if she was talking about what color she wanted to paint her kitchen walls. "I could have you tossed into solitary for a few years. Your only contact with the outside world a little, steel box where somebody would drop your meals off three times a day. Or," she paused until he met her gaze again, "I could have you transferred down to Block C, right next door to Drew Compano." At that, his eyes widened. Castle recalled the Compano case from a few years ago: a (rumored) ex-Westie who had massacred a squat-house up in Washington Heights after his brother had ODed on a bad dose of dope. The case had been the 33rd's, but it had been widely discussed, both by the media and every cop in the city.

There was something vicious about how calmly she uttered the threat. Not for the first time Castle was reminded how much her life was ruled by a series of hard, ugly lines. Sometimes it was almost difficult to believe she was the same woman who'd wake him at two with a gentle touch and a few whispered words in his ear.

"With the whip comes the carrot," she said, now that she knew she had the murderer's attention. "Tell me what I need to know and I'll see what I can do about granting a few requests."

He seemed to turn over her words for a second. Then, "Fuck you."

"I'm sure Mr. Compano will be glad for the suggestion," she replied, kicking her chair out with an ear-piercing screech as she rose.

"Wait," he said before Castle had decided whether or not to follow her. Seidman waited until she'd reclaimed her seat before he spoke again, looking utterly defeated. His face was pockmarked in the harsh lighting. "What do you want?" he asked

"Tell me about Scott Dunn," she said, leaning back.

He looked at Castle, as if only just noticing that he was sitting there. "Does he speak?"

"Scott Dunn," she repeated, not giving Castle time to think up a reply.

He glared at her afresh, "What about him, bitch? You're the one who arrested him."

She crossed her arms. "Tell me what he did, who he talked to."

He shrugged, and his chains clinked and clattered against the table and themselves. "He was quiet. Didn't really talk to anyone. Kept to himself."

"But when he did talk?"

Castle guessed the reply before he heard it, and he felt a prickle of sweat, even though the room was freezing. "It was about you," he said. "He wouldn't shut up about you, after he found out you were the one who arrested me."

She barely paused a second before asking, "And what did he say about me?"

He shifted, for the first time looking almost uncomfortable. Castle shuddered internally, wondering what could possibly make a murderer hesitate in discomfort.

"Abe?" she prompted, leaning forward again to rest her wrists on the table. "What did he say?"

"He wants to kill you," he said. "He wants to watch, and he wants to hear you beg."

Castle felt his blood turn to crushed ice in his veins, and he stole a glance at Beckett without turning. She was so still she looked like she wasn't even breathing.

"He killed you a different way every week," Seidman continued, seeming to have sensed he'd found a nerve. "Shoot you, hang you, fuck you, break you, bury you, cut you open a thousand times and feed you screaming to starving dogs. He was so disappointed when we'd heard somebody had gotten to you first, but I've never seen him happier than the day he learned you'd lived. We knew the guy who did it too, the one who gutted the cop and escaped. Did you see him pull the trigger? We liked to think you d—"

"That's enough," Castle cut him off, rage rising in his throat so hot and fast he felt like an entire colony of wasps had hatched in his throat. He couldn't remember the last time he'd wanted to cave someone's face in so badly. And when he looked at Beckett, all he saw in her face was anger and annoyance. For some reason that pissed him off even more, and he shoved to his feet and stomped away from the table, to stop on the wall opposite the one that the guard was occupying.

Beckett glanced back at him for a second, then turned back to Seidman to resume asking questions, though thankfully she asked no further details of how Dunn planned to murder her. She asked if he'd regularly talked to anyone, if he spent a lot of time with any one prisoner or guard, if he received mail and how much, what he did when he was in his cell – besides jerking off to the image of her dead and broken body.

It was on that last question that she stopped, caught on his answer. "Writing?" she repeated. "He spent a lot of time writing?"

"Yeah," Seidman said. "He kept a couple of journals. He was always writing something in one of those damn things."

Even from yards away, from behind her, Castle could feel her stiffen. "What was he writing?" she asked neutrally.

"I don't know," he shrugged, and then he looked at her, and his voice rose defensively. "I don't," he said. "I swear to god."

She said nothing for a beat. Castle wondered if she was thinking about the same thing he was, about the manuscripts they'd found in Dunn's apartment: _Night Terrors _and _Dead Heat_. And then he had a secondary, horrible thought— What if Dunn had written a sequel?

_Nikki will burn._

_Kate will burn._

Beckett wrapped the interrogation shortly after that, gathering her unopened folder and notebook before rising. It wasn't until she was safely outside the interview room and the door had shut behind them that she turned to Castle, her mask of cool professionalism having slipped a hair.

"He was writing another book," she said, so quietly Castle suspected someone three feet away wouldn't have heard, though they were alone in the hall.

He nodded, feeling too sick to voice his agreement.

"We didn't find anything in his cell," she exhaled. "He took it with him then."

The thought of what they might've read if they had made his stomach lurch. He could still recall how _Dead Heat_ had ended, with the two page description of Nikki Heat burning to death, trapped in the fire as her apartment collapsed in around her. Just the thought transported him back to his desperate sprint up the stairs to Beckett's apartment, into the smoke and the heat, when just for a moment he'd been sure he was about to find her body.

He was gripped by a sudden, overwhelming urge to grab her and pull her away, to somewhere safe and far abroad, where she didn't have to hear a color description of how a serial killer wanted to torture and kill her. Where the world was warm and sweet, and they would eat fresh strawberries and whipped cream straight from the can.

Her voice pulled him back to reality.

"...look through it. I want to know what those letters said."

"Letters?" he repeated, not feeling up to trying to retrace what she'd been saying. "Sorry, I didn't hear you."

She looked at him, the same way she'd been looking at him half the morning, like she was struggling with the urge to send him home or something. "Sing Sing's records indicate he was getting mail, more than someone who doesn't have any family or friends should," she said. "I wish we could read it."

"But prisons don't copy personal communications," he said, hoping he wasn't parroting back something she'd said two seconds ago.

"Yeah," she exhaled, leaning back against the wall. "And Seidman doesn't know what they were or who sent them."

It took every fiber of willpower not to reach out and smooth her hair from her face. "I feel pretty safe guessing it was his soon-to-be accomplice," he said.

She gave him one of her 'No shit' looks, but before she could get the words out (if she'd even intended to speak them), the door to their left opened, and Esposito walked out. He looked ticked.

"I want to shower," he said.

Pedophiles had that affect on people, though as a father Castle generally found his response was never so mild.

"Later," Beckett said. "He have anything useful to say?"

"No. Little pervert was afraid of Dunn. They never talked, but he said he overheard some of the things he said to Seidman." And then he hesitated, glancing between the two of them. Clearly, he'd heard some variation of the story they had just had to listen to. "About you," he added finally, when Beckett didn't throw him a line.

She nodded, seemingly the less effected of the three of them, then briefly recounted the pertinents from her own interview.

"So what now?" Esposito asked when she had finished.

"Have one of the guards raise Dobbs," she replied. "Tell him to have the other prisoners sent here. I have a feeling from what Seidman and Burchett said that they won't know anything, but we need to talk to them anyway. If you wouldn't mind starting the interviews, I want to go back to Dunn's cell and search it again."

He nodded.

She glanced back, at Castle. "Who do you want to go with?" she asked him.

The thought of leaving her to search Dunn's cell alone sent a clump of broken glass down his throat. "I'll stay with you," he replied.

She nodded once, and it looked for a second like she smiled before turning back to her detective. "Thanks, Espo," she said, and then she started off down the hall, as if she knew where she was going.

Of course, Castle realized as he quickly moved to follow, she probably did know exactly where she was going. And that was the crux of the problem— or one of them, anyway.


	4. Northdown C

_I wanted to say thank you all for the reviews and the alerts. I know Ticking's kind of black, but it's been a labor of love (and I guess sadism) since I concepted and started drafting it back in December (oi, it took me so long), so it's been affirming to see that there is an interest for this sort of fic.  
Okay, that's it._

* * *

Chapter Four: Northdown C

* * *

The morgue was a chilly little island of clean, sloping tile and a thousand whirring fans. All was white and steel and shiny, everything just so, her exam room a tidy fortress whose visitors rarely stayed for long – whether they came in on their own two feet or were pushed in on wheels. Assistant MEs scurried around, barely talking, armored from the outside world by their clipboards and ill-fitting scrubs. Today there were four of them in the room, split between her and another, older ME – Lloyd Kroll, MD, PhD. Lanie Parish could still recall the day she'd first met him, when he'd blatantly broken every OSHA code in the book by bringing his half-eaten sandwich into the morgue to declare his pleasure at finally seeing another woman in the building who was both younger and better preserved than the Queen of England.

She'd shut down the interest six seconds into their working relationship, but even over ten years and a marriage later, he still sometimes made a pass, if only a joking one. Today there wasn't any such teasing as they'd transferred the dead cops to the table and cut off their uniforms. The sight of the bloodied NYPD patches on the shirts had been enough to weaken her steel-hardened stomach, and she'd been silently wishing for him to say something, anything, to lighten the mood as they'd stripped off badges and holsters, though he hadn't. She'd worked only four cop killings in her time as a medical examiner, and these two had been the first since she'd ridden the gurney with her friend, staring at a uniform that was much the same at these, trying desperately to stem that hot tide of red as it had lapped and flowed over her fingertips.

As she stared down at the naked boy on her table, she was amazed again by how easy it was to get caught on a little spark of light, to be transported back a few years without having willed it, to be back upstairs, watching helplessly as the wheel left its long, red trail in its wake. The sharp, sharp scent of blood, so different from the meat-locker smell she'd grown more or less used to over the years, so acrid it had clung to the inside of her nose and the roof of her mouth for days, burning every time she'd inhaled.

She remembered her terror that her friend would end up exiting the back doors; that she'd end up riding the elevator down...

Lanie swallowed, stripping off her gloves, then remembered the recorder was still going. She hit the button and tossed the pink polyisoprene in the nearest waste bin, then turned to glance back down at the cop on her table. Mathew Reyes had been 24 when either Scott Dunn or his accomplice had pressed the barrel of a mid-sized pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet had come out of his skull through the eye socket near the nasal bone, taking with it a large portion of his face. She knew he would end up getting a funeral with a flag draped over his coffin, just as she knew that it would end up being closed-casket. She'd seen a skilled mortician work magic, but nothing could be done for this poor boy's face. Most of the skin had sloughed off as she'd been teasing the skin off the skull to have at the braincase, sending a shower of red bone to the table and the floor. She'd ended up having to relocate them to a small evidence bag, which she'd tucked just under his chin. As she stared at his body, she thought it might be more merciful to just boil him down.

She considered again what she was going to say the family when they got here, how she was going to explain to them that they couldn't see their son's body. Sometimes people just accepted it, but she knew that for others death wasn't truly real until they'd touched it with their own hands, until it had been carved into a slab of granite. And for cops it was always harder. She'd already been visited by several officers from the 5, some of them rookies, others detectives and higher-ups, some of whom she'd known for a long time. Captain Jeff Otis had visited yesterday with Victoria Gates in tow, and he had been one to insist that he see the bodies himself. That had been tough, standing there with the two captains, all three of them struggling to understand how and why any of this was happening. Death was their trade, something they worked through every day, but it was always different with cops.

Now more than ever, she thought glumly.

And while she was on the subject...

She turned from the boy and the exam room, knowing she should call Beckett, though neither she nor Lloyd had found anything of even the slightest use to give her. She'd already called her twice before, once just to say morning, and once to say she'd sent the bullets off to Ballistics. Both times Beckett had conveyed a "thanks for your concern" that didn't quite reach her voice, but then again the detective had never been one for the touchy-feely, not unless she was really upset or really drunk – and one tended to precede the other. If anything, it was comforting to hear how normal she'd sounded, as if it was just a normal day, as if she hadn't spent four solid hours yesterday standing on the exam room floor so still and blank she'd looked like she'd been carved there, watching silently as Lanie had done all the things to Jane Doe's corpse that would usually have made her wince.

She briefly considered if she should bother asking how she was feeling as she pulled out her phone, moving to a space in the morgue that wasn't a dead zone. She remembered just as she was dialing that Castle had once made that 'dead zone' pun, back within that first month of knowing him, and that she and Beckett had exchanged such an eye roll that he had burst out laughing at them. The sound had seemed so unnatural and so inappropriate given the setting that she had laughed too, and even her friend had cracked a smile, though she'd denied it the second he noticed it.

She smiled herself at the memory, but it faded quickly as she brought the phone to her ear and listened to it ring. "Hey," was the answer on the third ring. Beckett's voice was slightly garbled, though she sounded as exhausted as before.

"Hey yourself," she replied, then listened as something that sounded vaguely like Castle hit the receiver in a short crackle of feedback. "It's Lanie," she could just make out Beckett say, and then her voice came on again more clearly, as she spoke into the phone, "Have you got anything?"

Her friend didn't exactly sound hopeful, but Lanie still felt crappy about admitting to her that she didn't. There was silence on the other end of the call for a few seconds when she stopped talking, and she filled it with her voice again: her pal Jordan Shaw, FBI, had come down an hour ago, the morgue apparently her last stop in her sweep to all the labs. She had offered Quantico and the use of a couple sci-fi gadgets, to be specially shipped from Virginia, and she'd looked frustrated when Lanie had said thank you but there simply wasn't anything to find.

Beckett didn't ask for details, so Lanie moved on to her questions. "You find anything at Sing Sing?"

"No," she replied shortly, in a way that said she had but that it wasn't anything useful.

"You alright?" she asked. She knew from experience that the third time couldn't charm, but sometimes fifteenth had results.

"Yeah."

Apparently not. She sighed, directing her breath directly into the phone so Beckett could catch the hint. She wondered if she'd be getting different answers if Castle wasn't listening in. "Well, call me if you want to talk."

"I will." The lie was so quick and smooth it almost sounded natural, though Lanie had long since stopped feeling hurt over this sort of thing. She was gearing up for goodbye when her friend added, in a voice with half the confidence and the volume, "Thank you."

She paused then. In her experience, when Kate Beckett started to show the stress, it was time to run screaming for safe haven. "It's my job," she replied, keeping her voice light.

"Well, I appreciate it." She paused for a second, and Lanie said nothing, hoping to bait her into talking, but instead all she eventually said was, "Bye."

"Bye, sweetie," she said, then dropped her hand when she heard the line click. She stared at the little plastic rectangle, remembering all the other times she'd heard that particular tone in her friend's voice. Every memory was a bad one.

"Hey," Lloyd's voice suddenly broke through her thoughts. "We've got that crash in 3. You finished with Reyes?"

She looked at him, blinking, then cleared her throat. "Uh, yes. I'll be in in a few minutes."

"Right-o," he replied, and then he walked past her, to room 3. Lanie sighed and shoved her phone into her pocket, then moved in the opposite direction he had gone, her thoughts on the break room, its styrofoam cups, and its water cooler. As she grabbed a cup and pulled the bright, blue tab, all she could wonder was how bad things were, and how much worse they could possibly get.

* * *

It was absolutely pissing it down as Beckett coasted down FDR. From 278, Manhattan had seemed a distant, white-ish grey smudge, the skyline reduced to a few broken teeth jutting from the mass. Only now could she truly make out the towering structures of the East Side, Midtown, and beyond, chalky and discordant on the horizon. Bare trees and other cars blurred by, their forms as gauzy and indistinct as running paint. Some part of her considered murderers and hurricanes as she tapped the gas.

"Take the next exit," Castle said for the hundredth time. Or maybe just the sixth.

Beckett glanced at him, waiting for the follow-up.

He didn't disappoint. "I'm hungry," he said, "and so are you. We passed by many a fine establishment in the Bronx, and even as I speak we're passing more."

"This is New York, Castle," she replied. "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a deli and a pizza."

"All the more reason to stop."

She could feel his gaze boring a hole into the side of her head, just as her stomach groaned with another hollow sort of ache. The truth was, aside from yesterday's doughnut, she couldn't remember if she'd eaten anything in the last two days, but the thought of stopping to get anything stabbed at her with a sharp prick of guilt. She just wanted to get back to the precinct, even if she wasn't entirely sure what she could do once she got there.

(_he wants to shoot you to __**cut**__ you open to __**die**__ die begging burning_)

"Beckett, the exit."

She blinked. This time his voice lacked the softness and the cajoling, and she glanced at him, brows dipping, trying to shut away the horrible little demon in her ear.

"Please," he added.

Her stomach chose that moment to let out another strangled gargle as something that felt like a bubble popped inside. It was so loud she could hear it over the heater and the engine, and she knew he'd heard it too. Feeling betrayed by her own body, she flicked the turn signal and got into the right lane, to wait for the next exit.

"Thanks," he said.

She grunted in acknowledgment, hating that he was right, hating that she almost felt relieved.

When she turned onto East 96th, she just drove straight, asking him with as little irritation as she could manage to direct her to the nearest "fine establishment." On a different day, they might've discussed menus, and she would've been capable of having an opinion, but today that seemed as achievable as conjuring a lead from thin air. He didn't end up saying anything until they'd hit the park, and she turned onto Museum Mile as his direction. They were somewhere near the Guggenheim when he told her to try to find somewhere to park, and she ended up turning sharply onto 90th when she spotted brake lights.

"The gods smile on us," Castle remarked wryly as she claimed the spot that had been vacated less than a second before. Someone honked as they passed, and the noise sounded distorted in the rain.

Beckett didn't reply, despite the small, vaguely teenage flush of pride she felt in both in her luck and her tight, flawless parking. Her mom had taught her well.

She groped blindly in the back for an umbrella and her coat as Castle got out of the car. Once she found them, she opened the door and stepped out herself, flipping the umbrella up. She shrugged into her coat as she headed to the sidewalk, and Castle quickly moved to join her under her shelter, his hair already wet and sticking to his face.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"That way." He pointed southwest. "Three blocks."

"Okay," she said, falling into step beside him. Rain beat steadily against the umbrella, cars passed on neighboring streets. Nearby, some fifteen thousand people from a hundred different countries were milling around one art museum or another, gazing at anything from to Sophie Calle to Egyptian combs to Jackson Pollock. Under the shadows of the highrises, it was almost easy to feel small.

(_Kate will __**burn**__ Kate will die will __**bleed**_)

They walked by other pedestrians, other couples, passed gratefully under the shelter of some scaffolding for half a block, where they skirted a guy selling umbrellas from a shoulder bag. By the time Castle stopped, Beckett was feeling cold and hungry, and for once she didn't make a move to be first at the door. The sound of the outside world receded when they walked inside, and she recognized Django Reinhardt over the hum of a group of seven people talking against the far, right wall. She recalled the sign etched into the glass, translating the French on autopilot as she slipped her umbrella into one of the plastic bags provided at the door: _Tout va bein_, All is well.

She wondered if Castle was trying to tell her something through his choice as a waiter made eye contact with them and walked over. He was mid-20s, lean, goatee neatly trimmed; attractive in the bland sort of way half the men his age in the city seemed to be. He told them to pick a seat, and Beckett took one against the left wall, under a large mirror. The walls were faux adobe, the décor white on dark on dark, and white candles in little white bowls flickered on all the tables. Everything felt warm and clean and quiet. It wasn't really the sort of place Beckett would've chosen for lunch, but, then again, she wasn't one to pay 20 bucks for a salad on a whim. Still, there was something oddly comforting about the spotless, white table linen and the fresh tea candle in its bowl, as if it all was inviting her to believe that the world truly could be simple and tidy and bloodless.

She draped her coat over the chair back and sat down, tucking her baggied umbrella into a pocket. The waiter appeared to drop off two goblets and a carafe of water. Thinly sliced lemon floated in suspension between the ice cubes. She took a drink after he poured her a glass, then watched as he refilled it. His badge identified him as Erin.

"Bread?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes," Castle said, even though he'd directed the question to her. "Please."

"Anything to drink?"

They both refused, and he nodded before walking away, to disappear behind a set of swinging doors.

"Looks nice," Beckett said.

"Yeah," Castle replied. "I think it's been here since 2005 or something."

She nodded, then picked at her menu, hungry but feeling no real desire to eat. "Anything good?"

He shrugged, "I like the fish. We could do prix fixe though."

She glanced at the price and had to physically check the impulse to wince. "No, that's alright." She still hadn't gotten quite used to having meals that cost more in one sitting than she'd normally spend in a week, especially when the laws of pride and decency saw it her turn to cover the bill. Though even ignoring the cost, everything in the price fix sounded far, far too rich.

After going back and forth on the menu for a few minutes, she settled on a salmon salad, while Castle opted for something involving chicken and cheese. Once Erin came back with their bread, they gave him their orders, and it was exactly at that moment that the easy part ended.

Castle reached for bread and dipped it in the oil and vinegar, then left it suspended over the plate for a second as he looked at her.

"You alright?" he asked the question he'd managed to keep on hold for the last hour.

"Yeah," she said automatically, reaching for the bread. He caught her hand, and she looked up at him, knowing that this time he wasn't going to just let it go.

"Beckett," he said gently.

"Okay," she said after a moment's strained silence. He released her, and she let her hand fall back to her lap, bread-less. "What do you want to hear?"

He looked slightly wounded. "I just want you to talk to me."

She'd already known that, but that didn't make it any easier.

"It's just..." he lowered his voice, glancing around. The group of seven in the corner looked like lawyers or businessmen or bankers or something, talking about mergers and quarterly projections no doubt. They paid no attention to the two tired souls under the mirror. "Seidman," he continued. "The things he said..." he let his voice fall away.

Beckett looked at him, something in her lower back creeping at the memory, like a spider with feathery legs was crawling up her spine.

(_kill you fuck you burn and __**cut**__ and bleed and bury and die_)

"I know," she said.

"I don't know how after all these years I can still be so amazed by your strength." He looked down at the bread in his hand, as if unable to remember how he had come to hold it, or why. " You're the strongest person I've ever met."

Heat prickled her face, and she glanced down, swallowing. Strength was a shield she'd lived behind so long she'd forgotten how to lower it, how to live without it, but days like today it was all she had.

"I just wish..." he trailed off, then finished after a beat, "you didn't have to be."

She knew when she looked at him again that he expected a response, and she cleared her throat quietly. "Yeah," she said, reaching for the bread again. "Yeah, I do too." She tore a piece off the loaf, and it was hot in her fingers as she retracted her elbow. "But it's not really a choice." She ate it without bothering with the oil.

He studied her for a long moment, as if grappling with the next thing he wanted to say. Any of the simple pleasure she may have gleamed from eating dissipated.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"I know the look," she caught his eyes and held them, aware somewhere in the back of her head that that was exactly the sort of thing she'd do to a suspect in the box. "You wanted to talk, so talk."

"It's just..." He seemed to regret ever having started the train down whatever track it was heading. There was a long pause, then, "I keep thinking about summer."

And there it was.

If Beckett had been hot before, now she felt like someone was holding a flame to her face. Something sickly lapped at the pit of her stomach. "I'm not having this discussion."

"Why not?" he looked at her almost angrily. "I feel like it's relevant at this point."

"It isn't," she said, feeling the flash heat cooling rapidly to something like ice.

"How isn't it?"

"Because it isn't, Castle."

He stared at her in open frustration, and Beckett glared back at him, wishing he hadn't gone there. After a beat she dropped her tone, softened, wanting to assuage the situation. "Look," she said. "The time we spent was good for us— it was wonderful —but we had to come home eventually. It's not who we are. It's not who _I_ am."

He sighed, then hesitantly reached out for her. She allowed him to take one of her hands, and he squeezed it. "It's just that...in the four years we've known each other, while we were away I don't think I've ever seen you happier," he said. "And you changed the second we got Stateside again."

She didn't reply for a long moment. It was true what he was saying, or parts of it were. They'd spent a month and a half traipsing around Europe during her unpaid suspension, revisiting a hundred old haunts, a thousand memories. On her suggestion, they'd even returned to Kiev, where she'd taught him half a dozen swear words and the proper way to navigate a _rynok._ She'd found them _rosolnyk_ and _borscht_, _syrniki_ and torte, took them to a few of the nightclubs she'd frequented way back when, many of which had long since turned into something else, a few of which had not.

And it was true she had felt like a different person, if only a little, most nights. No gun, no badge, no corpses, her days an endless blur of food and music and sex and colors. But sometimes she had rolled from bed at 2AM in whatever local time zone they happened to be in, crept out to the balcony that would almost inevitably accompany their five star suite, and she would stare blankly at the street or the beach or the buildings, lost in dark thoughts. She would remember Bracken and the smell of his fear as she'd pistol-whipped him, remember dangling off that rooftop, remember Maddox and Lockwood and Coonan and her mom and Montgomery and the podium and the hospital that had taken a full month of her life from her, and sometimes she wouldn't sleep.

She'd never told Castle about those nights.

She looked at him as he rubbed her hand, and it seemed as if he wasn't even doing it consciously. The contact felt safe and reassuring, but at the same time she knew there was a desperation to it, the same way there had been when they'd kissed this morning.

She still wasn't going to tell him about those nights.

"This is my life," she reminded him gently. She knew she'd said something like that to him before, but she couldn't remember when or why. "I chose it. It's dangerous, but I knew the risks when I first clipped on the badge, and I'm reminded of them every time I look in the mirror." She felt her face flush at the admission, overly aware of her pulse. "And I do love what I do, even if sometimes that might be hard to see."

He looked at her miserably, "I just want you to be happy."

His words hit her like a blade. Over the years she'd gotten used to being in relationships with standoffish men, very few of whom had ever wanted to discuss her past or her work life except to attack her for it. None had wanted to save her from herself, or, at least, none had ever tried.

Castle's concerns were as touching as they were frightening. She found herself half-wishing she could pull away.

"Hey, I am happy," she told him, catching his eye as she gave his fingers a squeeze. "Truly. Not at this particular moment, but," she cracked the best smile she could manage, which she could only hope didn't look as lame as it felt, "in general."

He didn't seem reassured, but she didn't know what else to say. She couldn't leave her job, couldn't let go of all the hurts and the worries and the fears, no matter how far away from them he took her. The reality was that her ghosts lacked provenance, and they'd just follow her anyway.

Especially given some of them weren't even dead.

"What're you going to do about Dunn?"

His words pulled her back to the now, and she stiffened. All at once the sound of the rain and the city and the gypsy violin slammed back into her.

"What?" she asked, pulling away, though she knew perfectly well what he'd said.

"I want to know how this is going to end," he said. "If this goes anything like last time, we both know he's not gonna surface until he goes after you again."

She wasn't surprised to find he'd come to the same conclusion she had.

"He won't kill me, Castle," she said with a hard sort of certainty— because at this point she wasn't entertaining the alternative.

"It's not just that I worry about."

It was a full second before she got his meaning. She felt herself retract, felt the shield lift. She didn't reply.

"Kate," he was looking at her intensely now, as if trying to x-ray her thoughts.

But she had slid into cop mode. "I don't know what I'll do," she said.

"You don't?"

She felt anger curl in her gut at his tone, and she narrowed her eyes. "No."

He studied her silently. She knew he didn't believe her, but if there was a truth to tell, she had yet to even admit it to herself. The thought of Dunn, the thought of the conversations he'd had with Seidman, the thought of the two dead cops and Jane Doe and her muffled whimpers from inside that ice box unzipped something black in her heart. Over the years she'd become accustomed to the ugliness, kept it caged and locked down tight, but Bracken and Montgomery and the bullet had rusted the bars.

The truth was that she didn't know what she was going to do to Dunn, and that scared her more than he did.

But that was yet another thing she couldn't tell Castle.

She hoped he could forgive her for it.

"Isn't there anything else to talk about?" she asked, dropping her head. She closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair, allowing the sleeplessness and the hunger to crash over her.

When she looked up at him again, the expression on his face hadn't shifted, but after a pause a suggestion of a smile twitched at the corner of his lip, and he laughed in a short, helpless sort of way. It reminded her of the reaction some families of murder victims had, just before the dam broke. "It's a Barnum and Bailey world," he murmured.

She felt her brow buck, but before she could even contemplate a reply, she spotted Erin the waiter walking to their table, that vague, customer-service smile plastered across his face.

"You guys good on bread?" he asked.

"Yes, thank you," she said softly.

"Alright. I'll go check on your order then."

"There's no rush." Just as softly, light and worry-free, like they were normal people.

He nodded, still smiling, then walked away.

She watched him go, for whatever reason thinking back to that year she'd spent table-waiting in California. Life had felt so crushing then, though she couldn't remember why. At least then she'd still been able to count her losses. Nowadays they seemed to be stacked in rows all around, drowning her in their shadows.

"I ever tell you I used to do that?" she asked, not really thinking about the question.

"What?" Castle asked, following her gaze for a second before looking back at her. "Waitress?"

She nodded, reaching for the bread again. He handed her the basket, and she unwrapped the linen.

"No," he said. "When was this?"

"Back in college— Stanford," she replied, ripping off a piece, then offering the basket back to him. He took it. "Before I transferred to NYU. Even with the aid it was hard to make ends meet."

He took a piece of bread himself, though he stared at it as if it was something foreign. She ate her own, barely tasting it. She thought about that little two-bed back West, of her roommate and that bizarre collection of porcelain figures that always had seemed vaguely unsettling to her, like the part of her that was still six years old was afraid they were going to come alive in the night and climb into her bed.

She hadn't spoken to her old roommate in almost fifteen years, since her life had gone to hell.

"I can't picture you waiting tables." Castle had looked up from his bread.

She smiled, slightly. "I did."

"I could never hold a normal guy job, even when I was a kid."

The smile felt a little less tight. "You say that like you ever grew up," she teased.

"Touché."

They stared at each other for a long moment. She wished there wasn't a table between them, wished they could just grab her car and go somewhere, get off the island and away from the city. But just as much she wished they could just sit there forever, listening to the rain and the cars and the gypsy violin, just a few feet of air and a single, white candle flickering between them. No death, no past, no immediate, pressing future.

"We'll catch him, Castle," she said eventually.

"I believe you," he replied.

The waiter showed up before she could ask why. She decided as he was setting the plates in front of them that she didn't really want to know.

They didn't say much after that.

* * *

Running a task force was a consistent, if intimately familiar, pain in her ass. This time around, DC hadn't outfitted her with a squadron of interns or agents, given the office was stretched thin with sixteen thousand and three other things, and given, she suspected, the feds wanted to distance themselves from the prison break as much as possible, so she was coming to accept her dependency on the NYPD.

Special Agent Jordan Shaw leaned back in her chair in the conference room she and Avery had taken over. Her partner had wandered off in search of an overpriced smoothie some twenty minutes ago, in accordance with the wheatgrass obsession he'd picked up from his Californian relatives a few years ago, so for the moment she was left alone to wait. For what? Well, that was the question of the day.

News of Dunn's escape and subsequent murders had hit the news this morning, along with a photograph of Jane Doe. With both had come a flood of calls, and through the open doors she'd been listening to officers fielding them for hours. Past experience told her 99.69 percent of the tips would be crank, and for the thousandth time in her life she found herself giving thanks that she was no longer working in the scut, sifting through an endless, ever-growing pile of rocks in the hopes of finding a single speck of copper. She had little hope that the calls would produce anything that would help lead to Dunn, though she was remaining tentatively optimistic about an eventual ID for Doe.

She'd been hanging more faith on Kate and her team to turn something up at Sing Sing, but when the detective had called an hour ago she'd had nothing. The prisoners didn't know anything, and Zehner hadn't matched his memory with a picture anymore concretely than two "possibles." All she'd needed to hear was the tone of that "possibles" to know that they were empty leads.

So that was bust.

She fingered her scar, realized she was doing it, dropped her hand.

Sitting aimless wasn't her usual MO. Generally she'd have files, a notepad thrown open on the table, several documents open on her computer. She'd be profiling, theorizing, adjusting. But none of that was necessary right now. She knew Scott Dunn. She'd spent a day with the bastard.

Words flitted through her head.

Malevolence. Narcissism. Sociopathy. Sadism. DPD.

Others.

Rage. Envy. Hubris. Grandiose delusions. Intense violence.

And others.

_I read your report on Jack Whitaker. Brilliant stuff. What brilliant deductions have you made about me?_

She remembered the satisfying crack of his nose under her elbow. A temporary pleasure, killed as he'd slammed the butt of his gun into her face and shoved her into a car that had smelled vaguely of stale fast food.

She realized her fingers were tense on the sheet of phone records she'd subpoenaed from Dunn's last foster parents. Uncurled them. Looked down at the sheet again. No calls from a New York area code or anywhere near it.

The revelation hadn't been a surprising one, but at this point they were just treading water.

And for as little as they had on Dunn, they had less on the partner. He was a ghost. She agreed with Dt. Beckett's theory that he'd probably been in contact with Dunn as some sort of pen pal, but it wasn't something they'd have any luck proving. Sing Sing staff only skimmed personal letters for red flags before sending them on their merry way, making no records, keeping no photocopies. Even with them, she doubted they'd be much use. She'd bet Avery's salary that they'd used some form of invisible ink in their correspondence. Prison phone logs were useless. Dunn had no friends or family.

All they had were a few strands of rootless, coarse hair from a seatback from the van. If DNA could be found, it would be days, jurisdictional bulldogging or not.

She flipped through a fresh fax. Ballistics had taken a few pages to tell her that Officer Brad Falk of the NYPD had been killed with his own service weapon, a Glock 19 9mm. His partner, Mathew Reyes, had died by the same gun used on victim zero, the prison guard David Sharp. The mystery gun was a .38, and it wasn't in any system.

The morgue had nothing.

Trace had yet to get back to her. She'd flagged her case as priority, but, then again, in New York there could be seven agents pushing their cases on any given day. As far as she knew, the warehouse hadn't even been fully processed yet.

Bust, bust, and bust.

She glanced at the dead woman in the photograph again. Pant suit, snowy white blouse dusted with dried blood, fingernails raked and torn against the ice. Kate had relayed last night's events dispassionately, but she could see the younger woman was spooked.

Shaw flipped a photo off the file, looked again at the name carved into the ice box. _Kate_. The box had been moved to Trace, where she'd seen it in person. If she were to hazard a guess, she'd say the letters had been scraped in with the rough end of a crowbar.

She wondered idly if Jane Doe had heard him scrape the message from her prison.

When she closed her eyes, she could see Dunn doing it, in the very room he'd once held her tied and gagged, where she'd listened to him spout a near endless stream of psychotic diatribes. He was going to make her watch the building blow. He was going to drag her through the ruined mess of the building after it blew, and he was going to blow her head off in front of her dead agents.

Rage washed up her throat. She swallowed it.

"Anything?"

She opened her eyes.

Avery had found his puke green smoothie. He set it on the table as he walked in, then slid out the nearest chair and sat. The tall, plastic cup was half empty already.

"Nope," she said. "Why do I have a feeling you spent more on that than I would for lunch?"

His eyebrows pinched, "Your lunch was a muffin you stole from in there." He jabbed a thumb behind him, toward the break room.

"Guilty." She flipped the folder with its color photos shut.

He leaned back with his smoothie-o'-yuk, bright pink straw hovering a few inches from his mouth. "7.59," he said after a beat.

"What?" she asked.

"That's how much this was."

She eyed it the same way she'd been eying his drinks for awhile now, like there was a slight possibility it was going to come alive or glow or start reciting verses from _King Leer_. But she said nothing. Changed the subject.

"Have any thoughts on your walk?" she asked.

"You mean besides 'Why am I going on a walk in the rain?' "

"Yeah, besides that."

He shook his head, took a sip.

Silence fell between them, and they stared off in two different directions.

A few yards away, phones continued to ring. When she craned her neck she could see that the lead investigators' desks were still empty. Gates had disappeared into her office, no doubt fielding calls from half the state. Shaw suspected that her relatively low profile at the moment was the only thing saving her from a similar fate. Unless Chuck Baranowsky was taking care of everything from his high seat down in Washington.

"There'll be another body tonight," she said quietly, and not entirely intentionally.

Avery looked at her, brows and gross-ass drink dropping. He didn't reply.

She couldn't blame him.

Sighing, she looked back at her computer, at the word document and its flashing cursor. It was trailing her profile of Scott Dunn, last edited nearly three years ago, a few minutes before she'd walked out into the court room to face him again.

She thought back to the way he'd smiled at her from his table, smug in his orange onesie and his belt of chains. And she'd smiled back, imagining blowing his head all over the first three rows behind him.

Not for the first time today, she almost wished she had.

* * *

Brooklyn glittered like a collection of humming fireflies from across the East River. Just at his back, the buildings of Wall Street loomed like so many gargoyles.

Of course, he remembered as he stood there listening to the water lap against the pier, the East River wasn't a true river. It's a tidal strait, its water as salty as the ocean's, though at its deepest it's barely over a hundred feet to the bottom.

He stood there with arms crossed around his waist, listening to the water, feeling the wind whip his collar in six different directions.

He hated this place. Hated the people, hated the smells, the constant roar of traffic and subways and buses and cabs. Everything was expensive; no one paid attention to anything; bums littered the streets, lit their spoons under the shelter of a flight of stairs, a tunnel, whatever they could find. Filthy above and below ground; the detritus of eight million people piling up in any and every free space it could fill.

Any other circumstance, he never would've come here. But just as in the movies and the songs, a woman had drawn him here, and it was for that same woman he stood there now, a lonely shadow on the pier.

He kicked at a cigarette butt. Watched an old-style sail-boat drift by, made to look like some 19th century galleon. Even from here he could hear the voices of drunk people blending seamlessly with the roll of kick loops. He found himself wishing it would spring a leak, sink to the bottom of the East non-River, bringing them all screaming with it.

But it drifted by. And he watched it go.

Sighing, he squatted, tested the chain. It had finally gone taut.

He smiled, rocked to his feet. The cell was cold in his hands, chilled from the air and the wind. He tapped the number slowly, savored each ring.

"Beckett."

Brusque. All-business. He felt his heart skip a beat.

"Hello again, Kate."

He heard her breath catch. He could just see her frozen there, hanging on his words, a slender fish caught on a jagged hook.

"I was disappointed to see you failed to save her. That poor girl died, and you did nothing."

"What was her name, Dunn?"

He snorted into the phone. "I don't know."

He pictured her face the way he'd used to catch it through the slats, from the window of the office building across the street. Her beautiful face, twisted in rage.

He imagined cutting into it, imagined watching the blood stream down those gaunt cheeks.

"Tonight's your second chance, Kate," he said.

"Where are you?" she spat. He could hear her breath hit the phone.

"You're asking the wrong question," he went silent for a moment, then set the phone down, just on top of one of the poles jutting from the dock, face down.

Then he walked away from it, followed the concrete toward the bike road. The path was deserted as he followed it up. Somewhere around here it would lead back to a street.

A white light came out of the dark without warning, hit his face, and he froze.

"Bit chilly for a walk," a uniformed cop said, washing the beam over him, his body a pit of shadow.

He relaxed then, that brief, insane thought that she'd somehow already made it here already gone and passed.

"I was looking for Pier 17," he said.

The cop eyed him for a second, but in the dark his expression was unreadable. He resisted the urge to reach for the gun in the small of his back.

"Five minutes that way," he said finally, pointing north.

"Thanks," he said, flashing his best pleasant smile.

And then Scott Dunn continued on his way, melted into the dark.


	5. Infra Red

Chapter Five: Infra Red

* * *

They descended on Pier 11 with sirens and guns blazing. Beckett led the charge, her gun crossed over a flashlight. No one had really known what to expect was waiting for them, though Castle had entertained a few private ideas on the race down the island.

All things considered, it was fairly anticlimactic when they reached the pier to find it empty. Beckett barked orders to spread out and search as she headed toward the end of the main dock. Special Agent Jordan Shaw broke away with her partner and three uniforms, to search the left dock. Esposito and Ryan went right with two cops. Castle and the rest of the uniforms followed Beckett, the beams of their bright LEDs occasionally bouncing off her coat back.

Save for one boat on the north dock, the pier was deserted. A few lamps cast dull, gold light on the concrete, lighting effectively nothing. Bright, white lights scanned the concrete. Tension was hard on the air. Time seemed to have slowed, like they were walking through a strobe lit world. At their backs, cars rushed down FDR.

Cold knifed into them from all sides. Here there were no buildings to protect against the wind, and it was ripping into them with jagged teeth.

And then they were at the end of the dock. Beckett stopped there, sweeping her beam back and forth along the edge. Her light hit a horn cleat, which had been wrapped with a length of chain, then swept right, over a pole. Her light froze then, and Castle just barely heard her inhale over the rush of the East River.

"Here!" she shouted suddenly, her breath puffing out in a white line, her voice echoing off the concrete and the water. Her beam hit the horn and the chain again, and she glanced back then, to meet his eyes.

Castle looked at her, and at once he realized: there was something on the end of the chain, in the water.

"Here!" she shouted again, more loudly as she rapidly holstered her pistol.

Voices bounced discordantly around the pier, cops rushed in their general direction as she knelt beside the horn. She was inches from the edge of the dock. Castle stood frozen beside her, heart in his throat. The water was close below, roaring in his ears. Everything smelled of brine. The air was bitterly cold, gnawing into his bones.

The insanity of the situation hit him with the force of a gunshot.

"Beckett," he said, watching her fingers close around the chain. Her form rocked slightly as she pulled, and he moved to grab for her, but then she was on her feet again.

"I need some help over here!" she bellowed. She turned, caught a uniform in her gaze. "Call harbor patrol."

He nodded, grabbed for his radio as he walked away.

Cops swarmed around them.

Time dripped like cold syrup. Beckett indicated the chain with her flashlight, grabbed something off the wood bollard, held it up for the crowd to see. The plastic of the cheap-looking flip phone bounced the light off twelve different flashlights. A little black box was attached to one side.

The scrambler.

Castle watched as she slipped it into a bag some uniform provided her. Jordan Shaw appeared at her elbow, asked her something too quietly for Castle to hear. She nodded, and then the agent yelled, "Alright, people, let's search the rest of the dock while we wait for the ducks. Make sure there aren't any surprises. And somebody get some lights."

The uniforms broke away with her. Beckett didn't move— a hard, grim line against the grey of Manhattan's night and the lights beyond. Her gaze was fixed on the river (searching for harbor patrol?).

Castle stepped closer to her. He didn't remember moving away.

"How can we just be standing here?" she asked, voice barely audible over the waves. "Someone's down there. Dying... Unless they're already dead."

He looked at her. Light slanted off the edge of her nose, but most of her face was lost to shadow. Buildings glittered in the distance, far away.

"Harbor cops'll be here soon," he said. His jaw felt half-frozen in the cold. He couldn't feel his lips or his cheeks.

She looked back at him, opened her mouth, closed it again. She blew out a jet of white breath, long and swirling, like cigarette smoke, and then she took off, started to pace the dock. Her hair blew in the wind.

He watched her, feeling himself slowly freezing over, feeling nailed to the concrete. Fear swam around his stomach, and his fingers felt weak, though whether that was from the cold or the trepidation he didn't know.

He found himself staring at the chain. Someone was on the other end of it. Help was here, but they could do nothing, not without risking falling into the river themselves.

He swallowed, remembering Beckett yanking the chain. If she'd fallen... if the cold hadn't killed her, the current most surely would have.

She'd been a few inches off balance away from death. And it hadn't even seemed to register with her.

He peeled his thoughts off the image, scanned the water. Stared at Brooklyn's skyscape, at the bright, red letters spelling 'WATCHTOWER' on the opposite shore; glanced left at the glittering forms of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

Time dripped by.

Beckett stopped pacing, pulled out her radio. She was too far away for him to hear her words, but he knew they were sharp. Static-y, grainy voices replied in brief burst of feedback, and after about twenty seconds she signed off and slipped the radio back onto her belt.

She walked over.

"They'll be here soon," she said. "They're coming from near Whitehall Terminal."

He nodded, watching her fidget with her gloves. Helplessness washed over him in waves, over what little of his body he still retained contact with.

He wondered what was at the end of the chain. Who. Wondered if they were still alive.

His heart pulled painfully.

And then lights hit the dock.

Beckett was on her radio again in an instant, electrified back into action as the boats pulled close to the pier. She barked orders as she shined her flashlight over the chain. Some of the cops they'd brought with them reappeared then and started to help the boats moor. Castle backed away to give them space, feeling less than useless. Beckett stood on the edge of the dock, beside the cleat and the chain.

The cops on the boats reached forward with long, metal poles and hooks.

Shouts rang up and down the pier. Minutes passed. Something scraped behind them, and then all at once the scene was awash with bright, bright light. Floodlights brought day back to the night in blinding relief. Castle glanced back and up to see them, but his gaze was immediately drawn back to the water.

He saw the chain was moving. Someone had hitched it to a crank. Beckett shouted something, and then the chain was being lifted with a pole like a long, glittering strand of spaghetti. The guy with the pole held it over the bollard, and two cops helped wrap it around it.

He watched the water drip off the chain, fall back into the black of the East River.

There were cops everywhere. He suddenly realized Esposito and Ryan were standing a few feet away from him.

"You guys find anything?" he asked.

"No," Ryan said.

None of them had looked away from the chain.

He didn't ask anymore questions. Thoughts fell away from his head. He watched the water drip off the chain.

And then something pale breached the surface, knocked against one of the police boats. For a breath, everyone froze, even the guys pulling the chain.

"Bring it here," Beckett shouted, her voice cracking over the water like a whip. She stood there solid as stone, her hair and coat back blowing in the wind.

And then the pale thing was being lifted out of the water. The chain grated against the concrete pole, groaned and scratched.

It was another box, wrapped in chain.

Hooks were caught in silver loops. The box drifted out of view, toward the dock. Voices clashed over the river. The boat with the crank started tipping forward.

Castle watched in horrid fascination, realized he wasn't breathing. Took a breath. Promptly forgot to do it again.

The box came into view, pressed against the dock, blindingly white against the floodlights.

Cops surged forward in a wave. Hands reached for chain, for solid edges.

Gradually the box was pulled up, pulled clear, and it rolled onto the concrete with a heavy _thwap!_

Beckett didn't hesitate. From somewhere or someone, she had produced a set of bolt cutters, and she and Shaw (who had also found a pair) started clipping the chain from where it was snugly wrapped in the latch.

It snapped with a crack, and the broken chain slid to the concrete like a series of long, glittering snakes. As they fell away, a single word was exposed to the air— cut into the plastic in a series of harsh angles.

_WILL_

Time froze again. It was like they had all been swept into a David Lynch movie, and they were just standing around, waiting for the pin to drop.

Then Beckett yanked the latch, and the door swung outward with a hollow sort of sucking sound.

The pin dropped.

* * *

Kate Beckett sat on the hood of a police cruiser, staring out at the East River. Her clothes were still damp, and every gust of wind raised gooseflesh along its path. As far as she knew, the car was unlocked, but she hadn't convinced herself to get up and test the door yet.

She kept turning the ring over in her fingers, running the chain between thumb and forefinger. She'd drawn it from its place over her heart, and the silver had gone cold in the chill.

She stared out at the East River, lost in black thoughts, allowing herself to follow a progression of unpleasant memories as she shivered in the cold. For some reason, her thoughts fell back to her shooting and the hospital, and the years faded away, blurred to nothing.

When they'd deemed her stable enough to be moved from the ICU, she'd been given a bed in a single room. It had been on the edge of the building, and out her window she'd been able to watch the East River flow by more or less unobstructed. Trapped as she'd been, she would lean against the sill to stare endlessly at the cars cruising down FDR, at the boats and the ferries drifting down the water. She remembered watching the sunrise most mornings, watching the water turn gold. She always suspected Josh had been behind the room placement, though she'd never asked.

She remembered her first day in that room, watching the cops assigned to guard her help the nurses move her bouquets to any flat surface they could fit. She'd been clad immodestly in her most comfortable robe from home, barefoot, feeling naked as she'd stared at their full uniforms. Standing there weakly, fingers tight on the sill, it had almost felt like they were all attendants to some sordid funeral.

She shivered violently, pulled her coat tighter, though it was already buttoned to her neck. The material was damp under her fingers.

She pulled her mother's old ring up, stared at the light pinging off it from one of the floodlights on the pier. Then she blew out a breath, squeezed it once, and tucked it under her turtleneck. The silver felt like ice as it ran down her skin, settled over her chest.

She closed her eyes, listening to the chatter from police radios and the cops who hadn't yet left the scene, listening to cars rush down the freeway, listening to the water lap against the pier. She was so tired.

Drawn from memory, once more sitting in the present, the words started looping through her thoughts anew.

_KATE WILL_

She filled in the blanks automatically.

_Kate will burn..._

_Kate will bleed..._

_Kate will boil, drown, suffocate, hang, suffer, die..._

She rocked in another gust of wind, caught on the word.

_Die._

She remembered the warehouse. Or was it a podium?

(_Die. Die. DIE. __**Die**__._)

(_Dog eat dog. Shoot to __**kill**__, never to wound._)

(_The throne is not gold but iron, the stones of the high hall are black basalt blocks.._)

"Hey, I'm back."

She flinched, opened her eyes.

Castle was standing there, a few feet away.

"Hey," she said quietly.

"You alright?" he asked.

"Yeah," the reply was automatic— as was, she suspected, the question —but despite herself she found she couldn't slide off the hood. She felt frozen there. "How's everything?"

"Well," he said, taking a seat beside her. The car compressed under him. "My mother wanted to go out and get an apple cobbler at Max's. I told her to just stay in and eat ice cream with Alexis."

"You tell her about the detail?"

"Not until I have to."

She looked away, at the crime scene tape stretched across the pier. At the techs photographing the box they'd raised out of the river. The body was still laying where they'd pulled her away from it.

_She'd dropped the bolt cutters, fallen to her knees beside him. A foot or two of water had seeped into his prison, and his clothes were wet as she'd checked for a pulse, started CPR..._

His lips had been blue already...

_Tonight's your second chance, Kate._

"You tell her what's going on?" Beckett asked, clearing her throat.

"Not until I have to."

She looked at him, well aware of the comforts of denial.

"You alright?" she asked.

"No," the reply was short.

She let her shoulder fall against his, reached for his hands, encircled his arm. Her thoughts were broken and discordant, playing across the back of her eyelids like spliced film reel. She blinked and she was at the hospital; again and she was huddled naked in her old tub, ears ringing from the toll of six thousand church bells as her world burned around her.

"You're freezing," he noted quietly.

She blinked again and she was sitting on the hood of a cruiser, a hundred feet from the body of a man she'd been too late to save.

"Right back at you," she murmured. "Where's your other glove?"

"I took it off to dial. What happened to yours?"

"They got wet." (_from the body_)

He paused. "Want mine?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Detective Beckett."

At the sound of her title, they immediately, automatically moved apart, and she sat up straighter on the hood. "Yes?" she asked, looking around. The voice had been Ryan's.

Her detective approached from the left, hands deep in his pockets. A uniform was trailing his footsteps. "This is Officer Hardin," he said, stopping opposite them.

The uniform froze at the mention of his name, staring at Beckett like she was a tiger he'd glimpsed through a gaping hole in a wall.

She felt her skin prickle, though she didn't know why. Her gaze moved from Hardin to Ryan, and she waited for the punch.

"He spotted Dunn."

Something inside her curled tight at the mention of his name, and she slid off the hood.

"You spotted him?" she asked Hardin. "Where?"

He didn't meet her eyes, instead focusing his gaze on something slightly to her right. He was a good four inches shorter than her. "Here," he admitted after a beat.

That thing curled tighter, and she found herself glaring into the whites of his eyes. "When?" she asked.

"Before...all this."

"When?" she repeated. Behind her, she heard Castle slip off the hood.

"Around 9, ma'-Detective."

That was around the time that he'd called her. Hardin must have seen him just as he was leaving.

"Where?" she asked again.

"Over there." He pointed behind himself. "On the bikeway."

"Did you attempt to stop him?"

His eyes met hers for a moment, then promptly dropped away, came to study something in the air near her calf. "I didn't realize it was him, Detective. Not until I heard the chatter from dispatch."

That snake inside her was wrapping itself around her organs, squeezing tighter with every breath.

"Which direction was he headed?" she asked.

"He said he was going up to Pier 17."

For a moment she looked at him. Rewound his words. "You spoke to him?" she asked.

"Yeah."

She stared at him. Scott Dunn had spoken with an officer of the NYPD and continued on his merry way. If Hardin had recognized him... it might all be over now. They might've reached the man in the river before he'd died. She might've been hauling Dunn back to Sing Sing right now.

"What else did he say?" she asked, fighting to keep her tone even.

"Nothing, Detective."

She forced her molars apart. "Was he with anyone?"

"No."

She inhaled, looked away from him, at the massive, white letters painted along the side of the Pier 17— discernible despite the dark, even behind the other dock and the cheesy, old-style ships. She wondered if he'd really gone there, or if he'd just walked from the sidewalk to the street to catch a cab or meet with his partner.

And as she stared she felt something creep down the back of her neck, some half-formed thought floating just below her consciousness. She tried to reach for it, but it was like trying to remember a dream, to grab water.

Suddenly, she jumped. Her phone was vibrating, the ringer muffled through the depths of her coat pocket.

She murmured a thoughtless apology, pulled it out, stared at the phone. Her blood went cold. It was a blocked number.

"Beckett," she answered on the third ring.

"I see you failed again, Kate."

Him.

His voice sent a screwdriver through her ear. She was immediately propelled away from the hood, away from Castle and Ryan and Hardin.

"I wonder if he even lasted long enough to know you were there."

"What was his name, Scott?" she asked, swallowing rage.

He snorted, "Oh, please, Kate."

She was at the edge of the dock, at the metal railing. "You want me so much, name a meeting place. I'll come alone. This can all end now."

"Where would be the fun in that?"

She stared at the distant pier. "I'm going to find you, Dunn," she growled her promise. "I'm going to find you, and when I do—"

"How do you know you haven't already?"

The line went dead.

She dropped it from her ear, stared at it, then looked up again. Something...

"Was that him?" she recognized Castle's voice. "What did—"

She held up a hand, and he stopped talking.

That thought was bobbing just below the surface, right within reach. She stared at the pier, trying to grasp it.

Noticed something moving.

And suddenly it geysered, and she was yelling before she'd even fully processed the thought.

"The dock!" she yelled, running for the bikeway. "Ryan!" she screamed. "He's at Pier 15! Get unis over there now!"

She heard shouting behind her, but she was already yards away from the cruiser, her heart hammering hard in her throat. Her heels slammed into the concrete as she ran, sending knives through her ankles, the soles of her feet.

He'd been watching. He'd been watching them from the other dock this entire time, watching as they'd pulled the box up, as they'd cut the chain, as she'd performed CPR on a corpse. He'd been watching her sitting there, and he'd been watching as he'd dialed her number and lifted the phone to his ear.

She imagined him with a pair of binoculars, blending in with the tourists, grinning as he'd studied her, as she knew he'd once done from the window across the street from the 12th.

Rage boiled up her throat like bile, burned away the cold and the pain in her feet. Her gun was hard on her hip, her coat tight over her arms and her body. She pulled free a few of the buttons as she ran pell-mell toward the dock, her eyes fixed on the place where she'd caught sight of the human-shaped speck.

Somewhere deep down, she knew he was already gone.

* * *

The 12th had been hit with a proverbial tidal wave. Detectives were being pulled off other cases, uniforms pulled in for a lecture. After the conversation she'd just had to have with Lewis Palmeroy, chief of the 1st Precinct, she wasn't about to have a repeat incident. Every cop in the city already had a picture of Scott Dunn, on their phones, in their cars, on their desks – somewhere – yet somehow the serial killer had walked the docks of Pier 11 while a few of the ferries had still been active without attracting notice, and he'd managed to exchange words with an officer of the NYPD and then walked away free.

He'd then, if Detective Beckett was to be believed, managed to hang around less than a fifth of a mile from half the cops from the 1 for hours without anyone catching a glance.

Sighing, Captain Victoria Gates shut her glass office door, stared out the slats of her window for a second.

She was currently coordinating the manhunts, acting as the Commissioner's hand, which of course meant that all the shit inevitably would roll down to her, regardless of its source. Work and cell phones were both swamped with messages from the press and from various members of law enforcement. It would only get worse from here, once the incident on the piers reached the morning news.

Just the thought was enough to make her shudder.

She turned, pulled her blinds half open, walked to her desk, sat down.

She longed to pull the bottle of scotch from her desk, pour herself a finger or three. But she didn't. She just stared at her blinking message light, exhausted from the 6AM press conference and the meetings she'd been running between all day. She closed her eyes, ran through events.

Beckett had called during a meeting with the brass to tell her about Dunn's phone call. By the time she'd made it down to the pier, the body had already been pulled out of the water and media and gawkers were piling up around the tape. She'd been damage-controlling when all at once she'd heard an explosion of activity, turned to see a figure sprinting along the sidewalk, leading a pack of cops like some bloodhound on the scent. Officers from the 1 had jumped into the cars at her back, hit their gumballs, started trying to find a place to back out of the pier. ME and forensics attendants had scattered, some moving to their cars to allow the officers to drive out of the dock, some just trying to get the hell out of the way. The pedestrians her officers hadn't managed to clear were scrambling away as reporters broke from the mob, started rushing for their own cars. No one had any idea what was going on, but it didn't matter. Everyone knew in a moment that whatever it was, it revolved around the shadowy figure on the sidewalk, and wherever it was running.

Gates had grabbed a random uniform, demanded an explanation. He'd told her that that figure was none other than her own Detective Beckett— a revelation that only confirmed her kneejerk assumption —and that she was running for Pier 15, because she'd spotted Scott Dunn.

As Gates had jogged back to her own crown vic, hit the sirens, and used it to bully her way down the handful of blocks, she hadn't had the wherewithal to think much of anything. She parked randomly amongst the haphazard row of cruisers that had rolled to a stop on the walkway under FDR. Cops and pedestrians were everywhere; the cars on South Street had rolled to a stop, their drivers caught on the unfolding drama. Order had gone out the window. Beckett's call to action had worked the police into a frenzy, and Gates found herself running toward the pier in a dream, her badge extended just above her head to grant her passage.

There were a handful of officers on Pier 15, a few of them holding the mouth to prevent anyone from leaving it. Pier 17 couldn't be controlled in the same sort of way, and the cops there were spread randomly, looking at a loss as to what to do. Blue and red lights lit the dock from the restaurants and the shops. It was eleven o'clock at night, though of course in the city it might as well be 2PM on a Saturday. The situation seemed hopeless. If Dunn had truly been here, he was long gone now.

Gates finally spotted an officer from her own precinct, flagged him down, asked him where the hell her detectives were. He'd been about to answer when she'd spotted Esposito behind a blue umbrella pushing open a door. He'd stopped on spotting her, and she'd gestured him over, asked where Beckett was.

He didn't answer immediately. As she'd looked at him, she couldn't help but remember his suspension and recent reinstatement, the way he'd so willingly followed Beckett on her reckless manhunt, thrown himself onto the sword. Loyalty came with the badge— to wear the uniform was to join a sort of private brotherhood, and the connections forged between some members of police precincts weren't entirely dissimilar to the bonds she knew formed between soldiers. Coming from a family of cops, and as a former member of IAD, Gates probably understood this more intimately than most other captains.

And the look on Esposito's face had been all she'd needed to see to know he'd follow his leader again, down whatever cliffs she tumbled.

After a pause he'd nodded toward the pier behind her, said that was where he'd last seen Dt. Beckett. Then he'd asked to resume the search.

Gates had studied him a beat longer before letting him go. The reality was that she admired his loyalty as much as she admired Beckett's tenacity, even if both had proven to be pains in the ass in the past— and worse, downright dangerous.

Gates moved a stray pen back into its holder, smoothed her blotter, straightened her keyboard. Her desk was prim and spotless, ready for the morning meeting in... She checked her watch… five and a half hours.

She glanced out the slats, still waiting. Fell back into her thoughts.

Leaving Esposito, she'd walked to the pier, on the search for her wayward detective. The younger woman hadn't been too hard to find once she'd gotten there. She'd been standing on the second story at the far edge of the dock— alone but for her perpetual shadow, who was standing less than a few yards away, his back to the metal railing. It wasn't until she'd been halfway across the pier that she'd noticed the other pair of figures: the two FBI agents.

Castle had been the first to notice her.

"Captain Gates," he'd said.

If Beckett had heard, she didn't move. Jordan Shaw was moving toward her, her partner in tow.

"Captain," she'd said.

"Agent," she'd replied.

Beckett then turned. Nodded her greeting.

Gates had thought up a hundred angry things to tell the detective on her walk up the dock, but standing there, they'd faded away. Part of it was that the FBI was listening, and she wasn't about to involve them in a conversation that deserved to be conducted in private. And part of it was that the younger woman just looked beaten, and she didn't feel like throwing another blow. At least, not at that moment.

But it was time now.

Right now, actually.

Gates stood, spotting Beckett as she walked into the bullpin and threw her coat over her chair back. She opened her door just as Castle appeared from the general direction of the break room, a 12th Precinct mug in his hands.

"Beckett," she said.

Beckett looked up. "Captain," she said.

"Can I speak to you a moment?"

For a half a second, it almost looked like she was going to refuse, but after a glance at Castle— who had stopped just inside the bullpen walls —she walked toward her. Gates moved away from the door to allow her in, then shut it behind her.

"Take a seat," she said, framing her words as something between an order and a friendly suggestion as she walked to her desk.

Beckett sat as she did.

Nodding to herself, Gates bent down, opened her bottom drawer, grabbed the scotch she'd been considering before and two glasses. She set all three on the desk, then proceeded to pour a finger for the both of them.

"Drink," she said.

Wordlessly, Beckett raised her glass with her, and the two of them swallowed. Gates made a slight face at the burn as she put her glass down, but Beckett looked like she'd hardly tasted it. She stared at the glass for a second before putting it down, and then she looked at Gates with tired eyes. "Thanks," she said.

"I've got to say, Detective, I don't think I've ever met another cop who slogs through this much shit with this much consistency."

"It's one of my innumerable talents," she said dryly, then added, "sir."

She nodded. "You know why I called you in."

"You want to pull me off this case," she replied without pause. "You think I'm too close, that I shouldn't have allowed him to lead me to the pier, that he's clouding my judgment."

"You hit most of the main points." She reached forward, grabbed the bottle, then slipped it back into its drawer. "You want to tell me why I shouldn't?"

She just looked at her, that familiar "fuck you" burning in her gaze, even behind her reddened eyes, the same as it always seemed to whenever the two of them clashed over a decision.

Not for the first time, Gates remembered the warnings she'd gotten from a few members of the brass when she'd first been put up to fill Roy Montgomery's old post. Roy's inability to leash his favorite detective had been legendary, and Gates had known within three seconds of meeting her that the detective's reputation was not unearned.

Though over the past year and a half, she'd come to gradually understand what it was Roy had seen in her.

"I'm the only one who can work this case, Captain," Beckett said finally. "Regardless of what position I work, short of shipping me out of the country, I'll still be frontlined. Dunn's psychosis is centered on me."

"I've read the messages he's left you, and I read the stack of incident reports from your last encounters," Gates said, folding her hands on her desk. "Frankly, Detective, I don't know what's stopping me from placing you into protective custody until we've found him."

"Protective custody is voluntary, sir," she replied, gaze sharpening a hair.

She arched a brow, but otherwise didn't move. Her "Iron" moniker was annoying, though appropriate at times.

"I'm not going to hide from Scott Dunn," Beckett said after a moment of silence.

"Is this a matter of pride to you?"

She opened her mouth, closed it again. Her brow twitched.

"Beckett, we've been here before, more times than I have any other detective. It's been barely four months since you were taken off suspension for your actions regarding Cedric Marks. Don't force me into defending you from 1PP again." She unfolded her fingers, tried to soften. "You're one of the best we've got on the force, but you're hardly the only detective in the city. You can afford to step back."

"Sir, all due respect, but I can't. Dunn has made it personal. We don't know what he'll do if I'm taken off the case. Your detail will keep me safe."

"You have a history of slipping your details."

She said nothing.

"Your recklessness tonight put everyone on that pier at risk. Or did you forget that the last time Dunn baited you into finding him, he'd planted a bomb for you and another twenty agents to find?"

The look that flashed across her face told Gates that she'd come to entertain similar thoughts.

"We were lucky tonight, but you can't run through fire naked just hoping you won't get burned. This is your last warning, Beckett. Follow protocol, and do not go out leading anymore blind charges."

"Understood, sir." Her face was a mask.

"Now go home. I don't want to see you back here until shift start."

Gates could practically hear her choking back an argument. "Yes, sir," she managed.

"You're dismissed."

Beckett got to her feet, tucked some hair behind her ear, then headed for the door.

"Detective," Gates said, before she'd touched the knob.

"Sir?" she glanced over.

"We'll crucify the bastard."

She nodded but said nothing, then opened the door and slipped away.

Gates sat behind her desk. After a moment she reached forward and hit the speaker on her phone, dialed for her messages. What the hell. She wasn't sleeping tonight anyway.

* * *

The loft smelled like food. Castle ran through possibles as they walked in, and as he turned to lock the door behind them. Bread? Pizza? Mexican? Not Mexican. Who has Mexican in New York after spending longer than three seconds in California?

No, it was probably pizza.

He knew his mother had told him, but he couldn't remember what she'd said exactly. That conversation had preceded the call from Dunn, when he'd been nearing success in his needling of Beckett to come home with him to have dinner. He'd sensed a "Fine, we'll go, Castle, just shut up" in their immediate future when her phone had rung. And then the night had turned to shit in their hands.

As he turned from the door, he caught himself just before yelling "We're home," remembering that it was well, well after midnight. "Want something?" he asked Beckett quietly instead, turning to see she was already halfway to the bedroom.

She stopped, glanced back. "Hm?" she said, shrugging out of her coat.

"Want something from the fridge?" he repeated. "I bet there's leftovers."

She glanced past him, at the kitchen, and then her eyes flicked back to his and she smiled in a small, tired sort of way. "I'm not hungry."

"Wine?" he asked.

"I just want to go to bed." With that, she turned, walked into the bedroom. Castle watched her form disappear behind a wall, overwhelmed with that same feeling of helplessness he'd been hosting most of the past two days.

He looked at his liquor cabinet, considered for a second the possibility of a nightcap (he'd bought a new bottle of cognac the other day for precisely this purpose), but something in Beckett's tone told him that she was serious about not wanting anything. There were many, many times where he'd ignore the things she said in favor of his superior instincts, but tonight he didn't have any desire to make her night anymore difficult than it already was.

So he turned, followed her into the bedroom.

She had already worked off her turtleneck, and he walked in in time to watch her toss it in the general direction of a chair, where he saw her coat had already landed. He slipped off his own coat and jacket as she started rummaging around a drawer, and by the time he had hung them in his closet she had thrown her night clothes over the bed and was unhooking her bra.

He drank in the sight of her for just a moment. Half-lit in blue from the window, hair framing her bare chest, she resembled the sort of figure men would paint when they wanted to remind themselves what beauty meant. He watched as she reached for her oversized t-shirt and dropped it over head, then pulled her hair out from under the collar.

She was halfway out of her slacks by the time it occurred to Castle that he was just standing there like a dope. He quickly reached for his own drawer, started looking for a shirt. By the time he found one she was walking toward the bathroom, and he heard the sink come on as he slipped into his warmest, fuzziest robe. As he tied it, he moved to join her.

The night routine was comforting in the way that the mundane always seemed to be. He had missed her last night, and to have her standing there in his bathroom with a toothbrush in hand almost seemed to dull the taste of the last several hours of their lives.

After they brushed, he stopped her in the doorway, feeling like this was the closest they'd been since this morning— though he couldn't really think of anything to say.

"What?" she asked after a beat.

"I don't know," he admitted, as lame and prosaic as it was. Then he reached for her, pulled her close, suddenly aching for her.

They kissed, molded together in the doorway, tasted the remnants of each other's toothpaste. There was something intensely, desperately beautiful about the contact.

When they stopped, it was to breathe.

"I love you," she said quietly, fingers slipping from his shoulder as she backed off a step.

Her words still gave him an odd sort of thrill, a little shock in his chest. "I love you too," he replied, wanting to pull her back.

She smiled at him for a moment, looking worn to the bone, and then she moved past him, out the door. He reached for her shirt back as she went, wanting to stop her, but she was already out of arm's reach. So instead he followed her into the bedroom, stopped to look at her as she sat on the bed.

"Kate will," she murmured.

He thought immediately of the pier, of the word carved roughly into the plastic. And then he thought of her sprinting down the sidewalk like a madwoman, all rationality apparently left to the wind.

Though her instincts hadn't been wrong. He felt something ugly in his heart, remembering her pulling the binoculars up from where they had been tied to the metal railing, the way she had looked at him with the unhappy satisfaction of someone who had wished to god that they be wrong. At that moment, even he hadn't been able to think of a viable, alternate explanation as to why they had found the binoculars where she'd claimed to have spotted Dunn. The psycho hadn't left a note, but the thing had been message enough.

"Wonder what he's planning," she continued, though she didn't really seem to be talking to him. She was pulling on something at her throat. Castle knew the second the light caught the chain what she had in her fingers.

"It doesn't matter," he said, stripping off his robe and tossing it onto the same chair she'd thrown her clothes. The cold air hit his bare legs like a sheet of ice, and he immediately moved to the bed to crawl under the comforter.

When she said nothing, nor made any move to join him, he sat half-up, touched her shoulder. "Hey," he said when she turned to look down at him. "Everything's going to be okay."

Her smile was grim. "I feel like we keep taking turns assuring each other of that."

"Well, the law of averages demands that one of us will eventually be right, so..." he let his voice trail off.

Her eyebrow twitched, and she looked down at her mother's ring again.

"Anything I can say?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Sure you don't want that nightcap?"

"I'm fine, Castle, really," she lied, then exhaled and lowered her head to pull the chain off her neck. He watched her look at the ring for a beat before setting it on the nightstand, where— he suddenly noticed —she had also set her service pistol. It wasn't in its holster.

He stared at it uncomfortably. While in the past she'd told him she occasionally slept with the thing within reach of her bed, this was the first time she'd brought it this close to his own. He had long thought of his loft as sanctuary for the both of them, even before they had finally gotten together, and it was unsettling to see the sacredness of his space being called into question. Even if she wouldn't admit it to him, the fact that she couldn't sleep without her pistol for protection told him that that she was scared— despite the detail, despite the cameras and the doorman and the locked doors, despite the fact that he was two feet away.

The thought chilled him, but he didn't say anything as she finally got under the sheets, started beating her pillow into submission.

It was a full twenty-eight seconds before she finally settled with a "hrrrph" sort of sound. Cautiously, he scooted toward her, brushed some of her hair out of the way before snaking an arm around her waist. She exhaled low and long, shifted to fill the space left between them. He closed his eyes, feeling her breathe, listening to the rhythm of it. It broke some part of his heart to know that she couldn't feel safe here, with him.

He didn't know how long it was before she relaxed and her breaths evened out, but he was awake enough to notice it. He didn't fall asleep until some time later, lost somewhere in the smell of her citrus conditioner, in the memory of her leaning over the pier, hovering a few unsteady feet above black water. His last waking thought was of abyss.

That night he had a terrible, violent dream. He woke to find Beckett gone, and the nightstand bare.


End file.
